Misplaced Talent. Ungemah Joe

a lesson for any practitioner working on a large scale job analysis project. Gaining commitment from job incumbents or subject matter experts is usually not a problem until they see the full extent of what is asked of them.

      With the content validated to the highest practical degree, O*Net provides a solid foundation for a range of talent management activities. Wally points out its usefulness in providing criteria for recruitment or reward decisions, identifying training requirements, guiding the redeployment of staff, and informing career guidance. As an area of future application, Wally believes that O*Net could be used to inform what types of reasonable accommodation could be made for people with disabilities. But for this to occur, he believes that O*Net requires even more granular content and extensive validation with job incumbents.

      Unless your day job looks like mine, you are probably wondering why anyone would ever need to do job analysis again. It appears that O*Net has done it all. O*Net has a robust content model, applies to every conceivable role in the U.S. economy (which translates well to an international context), has been validated, and, best of all, is free to use courtesy of the U.S. Department of Labor (a link is provided in the notes section of this book).

      Yet, for all these advantages, O*Net does not provide a total solution. The language used in O*Net is necessarily generic and therefore cannot account for how a given occupation is interpreted by each organization. One of the popular statistics HR professionals quote is a finding that it takes six to eight months for the average employee to become fully competent in his or her role. Assuming that a suitably qualified candidate was chosen (having the skills and experiences that would be listed on O*Net), then it is not too much of a stretch to imagine that the six to eight months a new employee requires is due to the way job roles are interpreted and connected to work within a specific organization.

      Bottom line, job analysis is required to capture all the idiosyncrasies that fall between the cracks of the generic job descriptions. What makes Microsoft different from Apple or Coca-Cola different from Pepsi has a lot to do with the mix of talent they have working in their organizations and the processes that they have defined for how individuals work together. Competitive advantage from a people perspective is having insight into what makes your culture, processes, and roles different from those of your rivals and then finding and nurturing the talent according to what you find. It all depends on job analysis.

      The Art and Science of Job Analysis

      To conduct a job analysis, practitioners are tasked with defining the essence of a job, accomplished through interviews, focus groups, questionnaires, observation, or existing knowledge. This information is bundled together into a snapshot of a job that represents what employees are doing at that particular moment in time. As a job adapts and changes to new ways of working or different end products, the onus is on the practitioner to revise the job description. The reality is far from ideal, and I will talk more about this in a few minutes.

      Below, I will present eight popular ways of conducting a job analysis. Each employs a slightly different way at gaining relevant information and, as a result, yields different information about tasks, behaviors, or personal attributes. No matter which combination of techniques is chosen, a successful job analysis is systematic (having a predefined objective and structure), comprehensive (gaining multiple, relevant viewpoints that represent the job), and timely (before any major staffing decisions are made). When done right, job analysis forms the basis for selection, appraisal, compensation, and development activities, as well as compliance with fairness legislation. Here are the main techniques trained practitioners utilize.

WORK LOGS

      Job incumbents are asked to keep a written record of the work they accomplish, either after a specified period of time (e.g., hourly or daily) or when they switch between tasks. Individual accounts of the workday are compiled across job incumbents to discover the key activities that make up a particular job.

STRUCTURED OBSERVATION

      A trained observer watches job incumbents fulfill their work throughout the day, using a checklist of tasks as a reference. The observer keeps track of the frequency of tasks, duration, and accuracy of the items included in the checklist. The observer will often ask questions of the job incumbent about what he or she is doing, how he or she is doing it, and why it has to be done in order to fully capture key activities and necessary behaviors.

JOB SAMPLE

      Trained observers take on the job for a set period of time. Through their experience, they take note of how they use their time, the tasks they are asked to accomplish, the approach they take in fulfilling tasks, and the required skills they should have to effectively accomplish their work. This technique is more appropriate for jobs that can be learned quickly or that take advantage of transferrable skills.

HIERARCHICAL TASK ANALYSIS

      This technique involves breaking a job down into the typical tasks performed and then breaking these down into subtasks, usually through an interview with job incumbents or a line manager. The technique elicits information around the key objectives of a job and the skills and abilities that employees should have to fulfill them.

REPERTORY GRID

      In this technique, a line manager is interviewed and presented with a series of staff comparisons. With each comparison, the manager is asked to differentiate how two staff members are different from a third staff member in their effectiveness in performing the job. The technique can elicit a broad range of content, from how someone treats colleagues or customers to the skills he or she brings to the workplace. In my experience, coordinating the range of comparisons (to ensure a range of unique combinations) and explaining the task to the manager makes this technique impractical.

CRITICAL INCIDENT

      Job incumbents or managers are interviewed and asked for examples of critical situations that involved the target job. An example could involve the winning of a key account, prevention of a major catastrophe, or major change in a business process. The interviewer explores the incident from multiple vantage points, asking how the job incumbent solved the situation, the skills or experiences that enabled her and what could have been done differently.

CARD SORT

      Using a predefined competency framework (either generic or specific to the organization), job incumbents or managers are asked to select the core competencies required for a job. I typically ask for four essential competencies and two desired competencies. Once these are selected, follow-up questions are used to reveal the rationale for each selection. By compiling results from multiple card sorts, trends in competencies can be discovered.

VISIONARY INTERVIEW

Unlike the other interview types described above, this technique focuses on the future of a job. Senior leaders or others who have deep insight on the organization are asked about how the target job is likely to change in the medium to long term, with the aim of eliciting a list of behaviors, skills, experience, and motivations that should be prioritized now to future-proof any talent management strategy. These techniques are summarized in Figure 1.3.

Figure 1.3 Summary of Job Analysis Techniques by Source of Information

      When bundling job descriptions, practitioners should establish and maintain a model that will work well within their organization. Having a common job template drives consistency and allows for comparison or links across jobs. One such model could be the categories used in O*Net. Although this is a fine model to employ, I have found that the majority of clients prefer a simpler model that focuses squarely on the individual tasked with doing the job (not so much the organizational context). In my client interactions, I commonly refer to the five key ingredients of any job, which are not so different from the categories used by other consultants:

      ● Key Activities: What the individual is typically tasked to do.

      ● Behavioral Competencies: How effective job incumbents go about the job.

      ● Skills: The education and training that enable job performance.

      ● Experience: Knowledge gained in a given context that can be applied to the job.

      ● Motivation: