Job Descriptions: A roadmap to success
Job descriptions are a vital part of human resource management. Without them, multiple other aspects of human resource management would be difficult to complete. Job descriptions are needed to recruit, interview, and hire the right candidates. A job description helps set forth the expectations of employees filling the positions and allows them to know what is expected to succeed.
An experience that I had with developing and maintaining job listings was during my time as an office manager for a local IT company. When I was hired for the position, one of my first tasks was to hire new technicians to fill the unfulfilled positions. While looking over the job posting, I realized that the job description was vague in terms of what was expected of the technician’s knowledge requirements. Another issue of the job description was the outdated training and certification needed. This caused excess hours of sorting through underwhelming candidates. I ended up having to sit down with my current technicians and figure out the baseline knowledge needed, experience wanted, and the expectations of a technician. With that information, I was able to rewrite an updated job description. After reposing the job listing with the new description, we received an influx of higher quality applicants.
Some other challenges that are felt when not having a developed and maintained job description include difficulties measuring job performance of employees. Salary.com lists the inability to fairly and legally discipline or terminate employees who don’t meet expectations as another benefit of a job description.
References
How to manage job descriptions. Salary.com. (2022, June 2). https://www.salary.com/resources/how-to/how-to-manage-job-descriptions/