Importance of Job Analysis in Human Resource Management

Job analysis can improve management efficiency for organizations in the way of gathering a comprehensive intelligence to provide comprehensive information of related work. It refers that giving particular job specific provisions and completing the work required determining what course to conduct. Job analysis consists of two parts: the job description and statement of work. Through analysis of the work input, conversion work, work output, work related characteristics, job resources, work environment background, and result the formation of job analysis – job specification (also known as the statement of work). The work of identifying information included job specifications, job summary, job duties and responsibilities, and information of qualification criteria, which facilitate the use of functions for other human resource management.

Importance of Job Analysis in Human Resource Management

Job analysis is the basis for human resources management, the quality of its analysis for module of other human resource management has a significant influence. Job analysis is also defined as a system process to identify the skills to complete the work, responsibility and knowledge, which is an important and universal human resource management technique. It is the cornerstone of all activities for human resource management, which collects information for other human resource management practices, such as selection, training, performance appraisal, compensation design. Enterprises can find the problem, identify gaps through the analysis of existing work, and design work to be more efficiently or incentive, or undo the traditional hierarchical structure, arrangement, and replaced by the organizational structure of more flexible and more liquid.

In most enterprises, especially small and medium enterprises, human resource managers a number of errors for understanding the work analysis: Most companies see work analysis, job descriptions, work flow equivalent as the concepts of work norms, once enacted, the written staff manual system as the company system, which can not adjust in time as the business development; some departments of enterprises are confusion, responsibilities and rights of managers are unclear, job analysis is useless; some enterprises did not have work design, the internal status defined solely on the verbal description of the direct manager. The reasons of the existence of these errors are that managers of these enterprises do not recognize the importance of the good work design and process design to help businesses gain a competitive advantage.

Why Organizations Do Job Analysis

The role of job analysis work is: First, it can help organizations to aware the changes. Although we can easily see work as static and stable, but in fact, work constantly changed, people were often engaged in work who will change fine-tuning of work to adapt environmental conditions, or adapt habits of the individual to complete work. The reasons why errors could be happening during the process of job analysis are mainly because of obsolete description. Job analysis process should explore the changes for nature of work in addition to the static definition of work.

Secondly, through a comprehensive job analysis to diagnose the potential drawbacks of the Organization, job analysis provided information of job-related that can help managers understand the work flow, organization exposed the irrationality that can help managers to redesign certain aspects, and improve the efficiency of work.

The work managers reject the unreasonable structure of staff, reduce or waste of human resources, duplication or lack of behavior through the research of staff structure and the staffing management.

Job analysis is also important when primary managers make evaluation of the staff performance, managers must understand each one task of the work to be accomplished, and this process can be regarded as the overall search process for a potential problem of the organizational structure.

Meanwhile, the job analysis is also the foundation of the human resources management. Almost all the human resources plans or programs need to get certain types of information through the work analysis; it affects management of human resources in the following areas:

  • Job redesign: Job analysis and job design are intrinsically linked, through job redesign to make it more effective
  • Plans of human resources: The process of planning need to gain a variety of information work on the skill level, and ensure adequate staffing to meet the needs of strategic planning within the organization
  • Selection: It must be determined the main duties of job before selection of positions, and candidates must have the knowledge, skills and abilities. This information is obtained through job analysis.
  • Training: Trainers can clearly recognize what work to do for those were trained to ensure the effectiveness of training, that training helped their work done efficiently
  • Evaluation of Performance: To get the status information for every employee, the purpose is to distinguish the good performance of employees, bonus and forfeit
  • Career Planning: The individual’s skills and aspirations should match emerging opportunities of the organization. For example, some corporate employees leave the company for other companies have more important jobs to attract, in fact, within this enterprise has a similar vacancies, but when the company knew it was too late, which reflects the management lack of career planning, and communication channel is not smooth, and result the brain to drain.
  • Job evaluation:  It establishes a fair pay structure through the assessment of each work. In order to determine reasonable salaries for each position, it is necessary to obtain information on the work. Because the only in this way, it can determine what work should do for enterprises to gain higher returns.

Job Analysis Process

Job analysis is as useful is not so easy to make. In fact, it involves a process.  Though there is no fool-proof process of making job analysis, following are the main steps involved in job analysis:

  1. Organisational Job Analysis:  Job analysis begins with obtaining pertinent information about a job’. This, according to Terry is required to know the makeup of a job, its relation to other jobs, and its contribution to performance of the organisation. Such information can be had by dividing background information in various forms such as organisation charts i.e., how the particular job is related to other jobs; class specifications i.e., the general requirement of the job family; job description i.e., starting point to build the revised job description, and flow charts i.e., flow of activities involved in a particular job.
  2. Selecting Representative Jobs for Analysis:  Analyzing all jobs of an organisation is both costly and time consuming. Therefore, only a representative sample of jobs is selected for the purpose of detailed analysis.
  3. Collection of Data for Job Analysis:  In this step, job data features of the job and required qualifications of the employee are collected. Data can be collected either through questionnaire, observation or interviews. However, due care should be taken to select and use the method of data collection that is the most reliable in the given situation of the job.
  4. Preparing Job Description:  The job information collected in the above ways is now used to prepare a job description. Job description is a written statement that describes the tasks, duties and responsibilities that need to be discharged for effective job performance.
  5. Preparing Job Specification:  The last step involved in job analysis is to prepare job specification on the basis of collected information. This is a written statement that specifies the personal qualities, traits, skills, qualification, aptitude etc. required to effectively perform a job.

Job  Analysis Methods

There are some methods which a manager use to determine job elements, knowledge, skills and abilities are required to perform certain job. These various methods are as follows:

  1. Observation method: In this method, job analyst use to watch employees directly or review their films on the job. This method gives primary information of the job. It provides firsthand information. In several cases, workers would not be able to perform or function most efficiently while they are being directly watched at their work. Therefore job analyst may find some distortion in this method. In some jobs it is possible to watch an employee on their job but in certain jobs it is not possible to watch e.g. in most of managerial jobs it is hard to watch entire activity.
  2. Individual interview methods: In this method, the person who is responsible for the jobs are selected and extensively interviewed by the job analyst. In results, these interviews are combined for a single job. This method gives high an effective way for assessing what a job entails or what a job requires. But this method is very time consuming. It takes so much to interview individuals and gather information which is needed for the job.
  3. Group interview method: This method is also similar as individual interview method the only difference is the number of incumbent are two or more than two. It is also an effective method to collect information regarding a particular job. In this method accuracy is increased in assessing jobs, but group dynamics may hinder its effectiveness.
  4. Structured questionnaire method: In this kind of method, job analyst send a structured questionnaire to the worker, in which they check or rate items they perform on their job from a long list of possible task items. Questions which are send seems to be a kind of checklist information that is presented in front of the workers and have to response from the questions that are mentions in the questionnaire. This method gives job analyst a technique which is found as an excellent source of gathering information about jobs. It has been also discover that exception to a job may be overlooked and feedback is often lacking.
  5. Technical conference method: In this method, supervisors with extensive knowledge are gathered. This method utilizes supervisors with high knowledge. This method is used to get specific characteristics of a job are obtain from the experts. Person who are consider as experts are being invite in this method. It is a good way of gathering data. It is found that this technique often overlooks the incumbent workers’ perception and their thinking regarding what they are doing in their job.
  6. Dairy or log method: In this method, job incumbents are being asked to record their daily activities. It provides a lot of information but it is rarely applicable to job activities. This method is one of the forcing ways to get information. It requires lots of work to be done from the incumbent and that’s why it needs more time. If the job analyst want to capture information in the entire range of work activities, this method have to continue from a long period of time.

All these six methods are not meant to be viewed as mutually exclusive. Many organizations have different kind of positions; it may vary from skilled to non skilled employees positions. The analysis may use different methods of data collection for different positions. Here job analyst may make a combination of all method or some of the selective method. Some times worker find it difficult to complete an open ended written questionnaire and this may not gives the information which analyst requires. As an alternative interviews and observation might be more appropriate data collection technique.

How to Apply the Work Results of Job Analysis

Workflow analysis and design of organizational structure, affect the work results of the analysis. It is not right that separated analysis and design from the work of a particular organizational context. Before assigned specific tasks to employees, it should analysis the work at first; this process is the workflow design. Only with the full understanding work of the design process, it determines how to allocate various tasks be accomplished to each separate job.

Job analysis results can provide the basis quantitative indicators for the recruitment and selection, managers better select personnel through an analysis of what needs to be done about this task, how to complete these tasks requires the knowledge, skills, When the manager is ready to find someone to fill a vacancy, he must be accurate understanding possess the characteristics of this position. Meanwhile, the job analysis can also provide the basis for the remuneration of management by job evaluation results, more importantly, it could be in line with organizational change and development .in the transformation stage, employees will feel the pressure from the corporate, the manager adjust the inequality of job stress level by business analysis and job redesign, it increase or decrease its challenging workload. Specifically, the application of the results of job analysis show In the following areas:

  1. Reengineering: It fundamentally rethink and redesign business processes, aiming to greatly improve the cost, quality, service and speed critical, and other realistic performance targets.
  2. Job redesign: Job redesign is means re-identify the specific tasks methods to be accomplished, at the same time, Job redesign determine how the work link with each other. It achieves the link of the work mainly through job enrichment and job enlargement means. Job enrichment is deepen requirements and responsibilities of the work in the vertical level, for example, increased work requirements, fully authorized, carry out feedback skills training. Job enlargement is expand the scope of work in the horizontal level, more work categories for staff, it increase the performance of tasks carried out simultaneously with the full authority.

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