Month: October 2022

In order to get a degree at OSU, there are a lot of classes that you must take. You find during some of these classes that there are many that will help you later on down the road, however there are also many that do not. One class in particular that I found to not be very beneficial at all, which every student within the college of business must take, was the one credit class for personal finance within the professional development course series. Now I understand how this might be a beneficial class for most students and is not a bad class by any means, however as a finance major taking investment classes at the same time, you find much of the information in that class to either be common knowledge from your perspective, or actually contradicting some of what you learned in your higher level finance classes. I understand that this class is very useful for those who may not be familiar with finance, however this class felt more to be “busy work” than anything else.

Going off of that first class, I would say the most beneficial class that I have taken in regard to my finance major was FIN 341 (Investments) which was the class that I had mentioned before. This class had showed the correct ways to invest your money and how to make rational decisions. The instructor was very helpful and had made sure you understood what was being taught. This class is one that will affect my future in a positive way by giving me the knowledge to invest my money correctly.

I believe that in order to have an effective interview, there must be some structure as to what is expected, and what will be asked. There has been a lot of studies around the results of unstructured versus structured interviews and their effectiveness. With unstructured interview, as a hiring manager you leave a lot of room for unconscious bias to enter, often leading you to hire someone similar to you rather than who might actually perform on the job better. I believe that there should be a system to judge candidates on a level playing field by being able to score answers comparatively.

I have done many interviews in the past and I would say that the majority did not feel to be very structured, many feeling just to be conversations with very little detail about myself being explored or asked about. I definitely did struggle more however in the more structured interviews as a result because of the difference in questions that were asked. In the unstructured interviews there was a lot more questions that would be asked that I felt were not very relevant to the job and in the more effective interviews they had asked about previous experiences that could be indicative of on job performance. Although these interviews are much more thought provoking, I believe that it gives you a better sense of what is expected of you and the experiences that you might have on the job rather than a causal conversation. I feel that this also gives you the best and most prepared candidates. I would advise most employers to take this more structured approach towards interviews.

Creating a job description may be an overlooked task in much of HR, however I feel that it goes much beyond that. The job description is often the first impression that you make on a potential employee and is supposed to set the tone for what they are to expect working at your company. It should be a collaborative effort between employees, managers and HR to put together this job description in order to accurately define all of the aspects the job covers.

One of the main challenges around job descriptions is that it can be difficult for HR to stay on top them. Making sure that the descriptions are updated as often as they should because there may be more pressing issues that they feel warrants priority is a difficult task to manage. Another challenge is that it can also be hard to understand these changes in job descriptions and knowing when they may need an update requires a line of communication with the employees actively working these jobs.

In my personal job searches, I have been much more likely to apply to companies that posted detailed job descriptions that seemed to be managed well. I have been in multiple positions where I have applied to jobs with descriptions and titles that did not match what was actually asked to where after the interview I had withdrawn my application. Sometimes these differences in position would be something that I would have been interested in however after being misled already in the hiring process, I would no longer wish to work with the company.

References:

Tyler, K. (2018, April 11). Job worth doing: Update descriptions. SHRM. Retrieved October 17, 2022, from https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/news/hr-magazine/Pages/0113-job-descriptions.aspx