Job profiling – a roadmap for success
Agnes Botha is the HR Manager for a major corporate - one of her responsibilities is to evaluate each person’s occupation and summarise key outputs that are essential to overall performance. Job profiling is an important part of Agnes’s planning as it entails mapping the responsibilities, qualifications, competencies and reporting lines of employees.
"Some employers do not provide a Job Profile at all, which results in employees doing far less (or in some cases, more) than is required of them. This leaves the employee to their own devices, or even worse, at the mercy of colleagues who might not provide comprehensive and correct information, which might be important in achieving the desired results for the employee," relates Agnes.
Other employers go as far as to request new employees to write their own Job Profiles. Should this happen, the new employee should "run Forest, run", unless the employee approves this Job Profile in writing.
Shocking but true, it is quite common to find that employees:
- Don’t know what their job title is
- Don’t know what their responsibilities are
- Don’t know what performance criteria and standards they will be measured against
- Don’t know who they report to
- Think they have more responsibility and authority than they actually do
- Are doing arbitrary activities because their job description or role is not clearly defined. They look busy, but they are in fact not contributing to the profitability of the organisation
The CEO of Q-Photo, Piet Geyser, recently went on a recruitment drive, he says the following: "New employees cannot be expected to know what is expected of them if it hasn’t been clearly communicated to them. The Job Profile is the tool that communicates what is expected of them and neither party can later claim not to have been properly informed regarding this."
It is good business practice to provide all employees with a relevant, accurate and current Job Profile, and to use this profile as a basis for the performance review process.
"Effective Job Profiles should identify what an employee is required to know (knowledge) and be able to do (skills); how much of it and by when (targets/ KPI’s), in order to achieve the required outcomes,"relates Geyser.
Job Profiles should be aligned to business processes and linked to outcomes in a logical sequence, based on Mapped Processes and Process Flows.
Job Profiles should be verified "horizontally" and "vertically" in order to prevent gaps and/or overlaps between different job profiles in the same job family (such as Office Support).
Job Profiles are also known as Role Profiles, Role Descriptions, Job Descriptions or Job Analysis. They are critical for any organisation as they have an impact on a number of Business and Human Resource processes including:
- Actual job activities
- Recruitment and Selection
- Performance Management
- Training and Development
- Career and Succession Planning
The Job Profiles must contain at least the following:
1. A Purpose Statement that describes why the job exists. This is an inspiring statement that describes what products or services the company provides, identifies who receives these services (customers), and describes how these services are provided (values).
2. A job is made up of a number of roles. These roles are often stated as Key Performance Areas (KPAs) or Key Results Areas (KRAs). Many areas affect how to operate a business profitably. By identifying and monitoring the areas in a business that have a direct impact on profitability, employers will be in a position to reach their goals in a much more controlled and targeted way.
3. Roles are made up of Responsibilities or Outputs that must be achieved. These Outputs must be stated as an accurate and current picture of which Responsibilities make up the job, and must not include unrelated or irrelevant tasks.
4. The Job Profile must contain a description of the Inputs of the job – these are the competencies that the person who is performing the job is required to have. This must contain details about the skills, knowledge, experience, qualifications and attributes required to perform the job effectively.
Purpose
- Job evaluation
- Organisation review
- Recruitment
- Job procedures and performance standards
- Performance and progress reviews
- Development of training programmes, career pathing and manpower planning
- Development of specific plans for individual induction training
Features of the Job Profile
- An accurate and current picture of what tasks make up a job
- Outlines the job’s location, purpose, responsibilities, authority levels, supervisory relationships, as well as the inter-relationships between the job and others in the same job family
- Job profiling is a dynamic process which takes organisational change into account
- Is unambiguous and can be understood and interpreted similarly by both the incumbent and his/ her direct supervisor
- Is focused on outputs
Ways to conduct job profiling
- Conduct interviews and write a Job Profile for every job in the organisation
- Review existing Job Profiles and update them through an interview process
- Train employers in the process of job profiling, so that they keep the skill within their organisation – "teaching the man to fish" as such.
Job Profiles become the framework for job evaluation and pay structures. These profiles can also become an immediate framework for the performance management process, and can be written in such a way that employers can immediately measure and reward performance.
e-Job Profiling
Job Profiling forms the basis for multiple HR interventions. Because information on Job Profiles changes often, it is difficult to keep them up to date. With e-Job Profiling this task becomes more manageable with up-to-date profiles that can be used for recruitment, induction, training needs analysis, job rotation, multi-skilling, grading, performance management etc.
e-Job Profiling is a handy tool as it is linked to a database and web interface. The system can be used for setting up multiple types of Job Profiles such as
- Job Descriptions (to define the tasks and/or responsibilities per job title)
- Performance Agreements / Contracts (to define the outputs or goals per job title)
- Competence Profile (to define the qualifications and competencies per job title)
e-Job Profiles can be set up with multiple sub-components like KPAs, KPIs, Outcomes, Activities, etc. All these sub-components are kept in different tables in the database. The content of Job Profiles is not just kept in text boxes but each Job Profile has multiple layers allowing you to drill right down to the finest detail. It also allows links between the company’s strategic objectives and, for example, the individual’s KPAs. This functionality allows one to set the system up to support the principles contained in the Balanced Scorecard.
e-Job Profiles can be set up for specific job titles and profiles can be customised for an individual.
