I’ll start this off by saying for a good portion of my working career, i’ve been in a position that was fairly generically defined, sometimes to my advantage.
When you work on a farm, pretty much anything is fair game, especially when it’s the grandparents of a good friend. I’ve hauled pipe in a bean field, fished with my bosses grand son, and helped fix a septic tank. On the golf course, the position was defined as you’d expect it. Be prepared to to manual labor to keep a golf course looking great. Honestly, as a high schooler I was just there for some cash to let me go hang out with my friends. In the Navy, it’s only your primary duties that really are really defined, but you can almost always (so long as you convince your captain) find ways to cross train. The most interesting job with respect to my job definition was when i started out working at my current employer. I joined the company which is an engineering firm right at the beginning of a huge increase in staff. I was an intern so pretty much it was just go help whomever wants it. After a little over a year i graduated with my BS and was then picked up full time. A position was created for me so i never really saw a job analysis, though i’m sure one existed.
What was fun about those early days is really you could do almost anything. Sure, the jobs had a description about what all it entailed, but I was hired as a safety analysis engineer that was meant to stay in a certain area. I was writing sections for the licensing group of our application, I did software development, testing, and configuration management, I even did some radiological work. What i didn’t do however, was have part in the description of my job. I can’t imagine how difficult it would have been to really define those positions.
Fortunately for the HR department, they had a decent team that was experienced at the work they did. When a company is starting out, it’s hard to effectively define what every position is, but what you can do is start of basic and as a new type of position comes around you use a basic template, and then add to it what it is that you (the company) need, which is what I’m sure ended up happening. Then as you add more and more positions, you can then refine them. I’ve discussed job descriptions when we were getting ready to hire someone new, and found it interesting how the way it’s created matters to who you get from an application. Often times we were looking for a certain type of person, but the problem is when you ask for someone with X years in the industry, but are open to a little more, you won’t get what you really want. This was the case with my group a couple of year back. There was a back and forth over time where we’d get in applications that weren’t up to snuff, so my boss would request it to be changed.
Over time they managed to get it worked out, but I wouldn’t have thought that there would have been that much back and forth, nor that you have to be careful how you describe it because you may be open to someone with a little different experience. If you put 8 years down and are ok with 7, the HR team will toss anything less than 8, even if it’s what you’re really looking for, but trying to use the value of 8 to filter out types of applicants.
