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In the rush to fill urgent vacancies, creating a job analysis is something small business owners often neglect. But this can be a big mistake, as it often means the job description, and consequently the job advertisement, may not be fully fit for purpose when posted on job board platforms, such as Zoek.
Without a conducting a job analysis first, recruiters can end up attracting the wrong candidates to their job advertisements, or worse still, hiring the wrong person for the job. And, as every human resource department knows, hiring the wrong candidates can be costly, time-consuming and overall frustrating to deal with.
When you consider that 74% of small businesses hire the wrong person for the job, you can see how performing a job analysis is crucially important when it comes to recruitment and workforce planning. It’s all well and good promoting job vacancies out to job seekers through a job site/app, but ultimately if they contain generic job descriptions, they’ll end up attracting generic job applications rather than quality ones.
What is a job analysis?
A job analysis is an in-depth study of the tasks, responsibilities and skills needed to perform a job role successfully. As such, it should be viewed as the first step in the recruiting process. By performing a job analysis, human resources personnel can clarify the role’s needs, as well as define employer expectations; essentially everything you need to write the most accurate job description and produce the best job advert for your recruitment needs.
Creating the best job analysis for workforce planning
Identify the task/duties required for the role by talking to someone familiar with the position, such as the incumbent and their direct manager.
Compile all information regarding the duties and responsibilities of the role.
Determine ways to assess the difference between potentially poor, average, and above average performers.
Examine how workers in the position are currently performing and anything needed for the role to add more productivity or value to the organisation.
Now you should have a list of the duties you expect the employee to perform, as well as an in-depth understanding of business objectives for the role. You’ll now be able to put together a list of the skills and attributes needed by potential candidates, and even discover new ways to fine-tune the role for greater efficacy.
Finally, look at the sort of background and experience candidates will be expected to have to fit into your business model and company culture. Here, it’s a good idea to look at who they will be partnering or interacting with. It may be useful to analyse these roles too in order to synergise productivity between workers. A proper employee background check (https://www.ucheck.co.uk/) is also highly recommended just to make sure that you have investigated your applicant's education, credit, criminal and work history before hiring.
Get your recruitment strategy working for your business
Putting your needs and expectations of the company and the role in writing as a job description may take time, but it's one of the most important steps in the hiring process. It’s the key to finding the right person to do the job, whether you do the recruiting yourself or via a third-party recruitment platform.
In the latter case, if using Zoek, your ability to benefit from its intelligent job matching technology may become limited if a job analysis hasn’t been conducted prior to publishing a job advert. Ultimately, Zoek’s artificial intelligence (AI) technology provides better results (i.e. well-matched, relevant candidate applications), when more effort has been put into the job description details, enhancing the correlation between recruitment needs and job seeker desires.
Besides this, a job analysis can help you find ways to improve work processes within the organisation, support promotion from within, and provide employees with the support needed to help with their own career aspirations, as well as drive organisational goals. Conducting a job analysis can also be a useful tool when it comes to applying and demonstrating consistent, equitable employee policy across the organisation.
