Saturday, December 26, 2009

Who is writing job descriptions in your organization ?

Do the people who are writing job descriptions in your organization, follow these guidelines.

1. The job description is a text required to fill in the job advertisements space.
2. Job description is a set of few requirements prepared by HR to just fill a vacant position.
3. Job descriptions are what written by the manager, given to the HR department, who modifies them and publish them.
4. Job descriptions does include some (25%) of the stuff that employees perform in 40 hours of the week's time.
5. The job descriptions are to let candidates know, what are the requirements of the position we wanted to fill in.
6. The job descriptions go in the offer letter and then you bury them. Those are never discussed later, during the employment period and during performance appraisals.

If this is what happening in your organization then you are at serious risk.

Here are a few rules to fix this mess

1. The core of the job descriptions of the key positions in the organizations need to be written by higher Management.

2. Most of the job descriptions need to need to be written by Respective Managers, HR, the staff who is already working in the organization. However, these job descriptions must be simply validated by some of the senior people in the organizations. Whenever, higher management is going to run diagnostic check, they will start from the job descriptions of the people. So, it is better to spend time on the job descriptions early than late, when you are in big troubles.

One of the organization's, I worked with, wanted to achieve a specific (Security) certification in the next coming year. But, surprisingly they never mentioned it when they were hiring people, never mentioned it in openly, never discussed it in performance appraisals, and management was still thinking they will be able to achieve it.

Another, on-line web company's success was dependent on the user experience of their Product. They never mentioned it in the job descriptions of the development managers, project managers, programmers and other staff. Still, they were put a high number for users acquisition in their plans.

what happened in above cases. Organizations did not achieved their goals. Who is responsible and who should fix it. The answer higher management, managers, HR, people already working all should contribute to job descriptions.

Following is the detail who should contribute.

3. What each one in the team contributes.

- Higher management makes sure that the job descriptions are aligned with the core values, competencies of the organization.They should make sure what are the competencies required to achieve their current year plan. make sure those skills and competencies are in the job descriptions, if you want to achieve them.
- Managers should make sure that they include 99% of the work in needed to be one in the job description. It should put emphasis on the 20% of the core work that generates 80% of the output in the organization. Managers should never miss the core work that the employees need to put in, to stop bad hires in the team.
- HR make sure that the job descriptions are complete enough to pursue right candidates and retain them. HR should make sure, Job descriptions are presentable,so that best candidates get attracted towards the organization.
- People who are already working in the organization will put the nifty,gritty details in the job descriptions. Ask from them what need to be improved in terms of the core skills. Involving them will reduce the rick to ignore any skill in the job description, that is absolutely essential for you current and future plans.


Once, you have involved all the key people in writing and validating the right job descriptions, your first step to hiring great people in your organization is on your way..

No comments:

Post a Comment