Job descriptions are very critical to hiring good staff in all types of industries. I found it very important to have clear and detailed job descriptions when hiring for manufacturing jobs such as machine operators, assemblers, and welders. As our facility has a “one team” mindset, it is impossible for us to say that you will only do what your title says you do. Our HR team has done an okay job in writing and maintaining our job descriptions. However, there is an opportunity for improvement.
To be useful, our job descriptions need to be much broader than they are currently but include more detail than they do currently. You can tell by reading them that the HR team has worked with the supervisors in each department to help guide the job descriptions to fit each role. However, as mentioned in lecture one, they used a competency modeling approach mixed with a critical incident approach to get as generic as possible to allow the job descriptions to be managed more easily.
One thing we could benefit from is having a team that conducts a Task-KSAO Analysis as mentioned as an approach in lecture one. I often see new hires that come into our facility that have never seen a battery-operated drill and for sure have never used one. This is a problem because most of our assembly jobs require the use of drills all day to complete your job tasks. Our job descriptions are written so generally that they say use of hand tools instead of calling out the specific hand tools commonly used in the job. If we had this increased level of detail, it would possibly weed out candidates who do not have these skills unless they lie about their skills. That would save a lot of money for onboarding and would save money on training costs.