Some major challenges with job descriptions are that they need frequent updating and are often times outdated. It is common that whoever took over in the HR department inherited some out of date and poor-quality job descriptions for different spots around the company, and it is important to address this. For starters, I think that it is important to communicate with and consult the people that are currently working the jobs about the descriptions. Every job should be examined and if the current employees find a lot of differences with the description and their actual day-to-day tasks, changes need to be made. Another challenge is that these job descriptions should not be static and should change over time as the tasks associated with the job inevitably change. Because of this, I think that HR departments should make it a routine task to check in on the current employees to ensure that the description is still accurate. This could be done as little as once a year if the company has consistent structure but should be done more if there is a lot of inconsistency. Of course, to solve these problems, HR and the other employees would need to expend a lot of time discussing the job descriptions and rewriting new ones which raises challenges associated with a lack of time and financial resources. To offset these increased expenses, companies should make full use of technology such as automated emails/surveys. HR could work with IT to set up a survey that asks for employee’s feedback on the similarities/differences between the listed job descriptions and the actual job. These results could be sorted through to find common discrepancies and these could be the starting point for retooling the existing job descriptions.
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