What is job analysis

Running Head What is Job Analysis What is Job Analysis Inserts His/Her Inserts Grade Inserts 03May 2009
Job analysis is an important issue in recruiting process as it helps managers and HR professionals to determine main requirements and characteristics of the job, identify the main professional skills needed and individuality of a potential job seeker. To be effective in helping to implement company’s objectives, a human resource system must fulfill at least two needs: (1) accurately forecasting the human resource requirements and (2) providing management with the tools and knowledge for sound personnel decisions. In general, businesses and their managers have been slower to accept and act on advances in the social sciences than on those in any other branch of science (Beardwell et al 2003). Part of the reason for this is that managers feel that they have been familiar with the content of the social sciences, human nature, since their childhood as opposed to, say, the content of nuclear physics or microbiology. This leads managers to rely on what they perceive as their experience-based knowledge of human nature in personnel decision making.
Following Jirasinghe and Lyons (1996):
Job analysis is a systematic process for acquiring objective and detailed information about jobs. It is not a single methodology but a generic term representing a range of techniques. The data gathered may be in the form of information on job tasks, roles, and job holder attributes relevant to job performance (p. 9).
In organization, the role of job analysis has encountered managers who do seem to have developed considerable insight into human behavior. As a result of long years of watching successful and unsuccessful performers in particular positions, they can now make well-informed guesses as to which employee will be successful in those positions. This discerning ability, however, is likely to be specific to the positions and could not be effectively applied to organizational development programs for employees in different occupational specialties and levels of organizational functioning.
Job analysis is crucial for effective recruitment because it allows certain standardization of job description. To effect the standardization and control for which procedures are designed, they are presented in a specific format conveying information for a particular action to be taken. The achievement may be only one step in a series of steps or the entire series. Once formalized in this way, job analysis procedures need to be followed clearly to achieve their objectives. Sometimes exceptions in job analysis may be made to a formalized process, but in that case the manner of making an omission is also formalized. In a systems context, a procedure is like a hard-wired circuit. It ensures predictability (Baron and Kreps 1999). Therefore, procedures should be carefully tested before being introduced, usually on cases representing the extremes of the situations for which the procedure is designed. Though, it would be wrong to support that job analysis procedures, no matter how well-thought-out, can anticipate all possible job needs and requirements (Beardwell et al 2003).
Much of the employee’s and job seekers knowledge is cognizant, obtained in schools, training courses, and on the previous job. The problem is that much of it is subconscious, a distillation of practice in which individual solutions to problems encountered in the course of the workday may or may not have worked. In this case, job analysis practice provides insight into the necessities and needs of a proposed job and a scope of information not readily obtainable by other means. As illustrated in the bus operator analysis, they can also provide the content for the development of scales and instruments used in the more structured procedures. As a further precaution to prevent biased results, it is recommended that when an employee is required to complete both the Importance and the Ability booklets within a short space of time, the Ability booklet be completed first and, if possible, a day or two be allowed to elapse before the Importance booklet is completed. Regardless of these precautions, it is a good test administration practice to emphasize that honest and thoughtful responses usually provide more favorable results for the respondent and certainly provide more useful ones.
References
Jirasinghe, D. Lyons, G. (1996,). The Competent Head: A Job Analysis of Heads
Tasks and Personality Factors. Falmer Press.
Beardwell, I. Holden, L., Claydon, T. (2004). Human Resource Management, London
Pitman Publishing,