What is job analysis?

Picture this: an organization full of staffs. The so called boss is planning to ask one of them to complete an assignment. He is confused, he has staffs but he doesn’t know which one he can rely on.

Let’s go to another scene: a clueless boss is having nightmare handling her subordinates. They are much cleverer and more skilled than she is. The boss always becomes the laughing stock of her subordinates. And that makes her so ‘popular’ in the organization.

“The right person for the right job’ would be the ideal condition required by any organizations. However, identifying the right person to fill the vacant job is not an easy thing to do.  There are some steps that we have to do in order to fill a job with the suitable candidate and the first step is to create a good job description.

The question is how to create a good job description? Well, job description is the result of job analysis. And it answered the title of this topic: What is job analysis? It is the process used to collect information about the duties, responsibilities, necessary skills, outcomes, and work environment of a particular job. Simply put, a job analysis is a systematic process for collecting and analyzing information about a job.

From the definition, we understand that job analysis involve some activities:

1.      reviewing the job responsibilities of current employees: to know whether the current employees are doing their tasks based on the qualities/competencies, and to know whether the employees are overqualified or underqualified;

2.      benchmarking similar job descriptions: researching and comparing similar jobs in order to know the requirements needed for the same jobs in different organizations.

3.      evaluating the work duties, assignments, tasks, requirements, and responsibilities that need to be accomplished by the employee filling the position,

4.      researching and sharing with other companies that have similar jobs.

Having a good job description is highly required for any organizations wanting to improve the quality of their performances. Job description will tell you what requirements, tasks, and competencies needed for a certain job.  it is the first step in our search of finding the right person for the right place.