HR Week 2

Talent Management Process 

These are the traditional steps managers do:

1. Decide what positions to fill through job analysis, workforce planning, and forecasting.

2. Build a pool of job applicants by recruiting internal or external candidates.

3. Obtain application forms and perhaps have initial screening interviews.

4. Use selection tools like tests, interviews, background checks, and legally permissible physical exams to identify viable candidates.

5. Decide to whom to make an offer.

6. Orient, train, and develop employees so they have the competencies to do their jobs.

7. Appraise employees to assess how they’re doing.

8. Compensate employees to maintain their motivation.

Talent management is the holistic, integrated, and results and goal-oriented process of planning, recruiting, selecting, developing, managing, and compensating

employees.

• Talent management follows these steps instead of the traditional steps:

1. They start with the results and ask, “What recruiting, testing, training, or pay action should I take to produce the employee competencies we need to achieve our company’s goals?”

2. They treat activities such as recruiting and training as interrelated.

3. Because talent management is holistic and integrated, they will probably use the same “profile” of required human skills, knowledge, and behaviours (“competencies”) for formulating a job’s recruitment plans as for making selection, training, appraisal, and compensation decisions for it.

4. And, to ensure the activities are all focused on the same ends, the manager will take steps to coordinate the talent management functions (recruiting and training, for example). Doing so often involves using talent management software.

Talent Management Software

• Employers use talent management software to help ensure that their talent management activities are aimed in a coordinated way to achieve the company’s H R aims.

• Software may offer applicant tracking, onboarding, performance management, and compensation support.

• It helps the manager “recruit, manage, and retain your best employees.”

The Basics of Job Analysis

What is Job Analysis?

• Job Analysis is the procedure for determining the tasks, duties, and responsibilities of each job, and the human attributes (in terms of knowledge, skills, and abilities) required to perform it.

• Fundamental component of H R M.

• Critical to organizational activities related to labour and work processes.

Job: 

A group of related activities and duties, held by a single employee or a number of incumbents.

Position: 

The collection of tasks and responsibilities performed by one person.

Incumbent:

Individual currently holding the position.

Uses of Job Analysis Information

• Collected with Job Analysis:

• Work activities.

• Human behaviours such as communicating.

• Machines, tools, equipment, and work aids.

• Performance standards in quality and quantity.

• Job context including physical working conditions.

• Human requirements such as knowledge, skills, education, training and work experience.

Figure 4.1 Uses of Job Analysis Information

Uses of Job Analysis Information

• Human Resources Planning

• Recruitment and Selection

• Compensation

• Performance Management

• Labour Relations

• Training, Development, and Career Management

• Restructuring

Steps in Job Analysis 

The six steps involved in job analysis are as follows:

1. Relevant organizational information is reviewed.

Organizational structure:

• Formal relationships among jobs in an organization.

Organization chart:

• A snapshot of the firm depicting the organization’s structure in chart format at a particular point of time.

• Show how jobs are grouped into departments.

• Does not show detail about jobs.

Process chart:

• A diagram showing the flow of the inputs to and the outputs for the job under study.

2. Jobs are selected to be analyzed.

Job selection necessary when there are a number of similar jobs.

Job design: The process of systematically organizing work into tasks that are required to perform a specific job.

• Changes to modern work:

• More cognitively complex, team-based, collaborative, dependent on social skills and technological competence.

• More time pressured and mobile; less dependent on geography.

3. Using one or more job analysis techniques, data are collected on job activities.

Use quantitative and qualitative methods.

• The Interview:

• Individual with each employee.

• Group with employees who have the same job.

• Supervisory with one or more supervisors who know the job being analyzed.

Interview guidelines:

• Identify employees who know the job best.

• Build rapport with chosen employee.

• Use structured guide or checklist.

• List duties in order of importance and frequency of occurrence.

• Review data with interviewee and immediate supervisor.

Questionnaire:

• Position analysis questionnaire (P A Q):

  • A questionnaire used to collect quantifiable data concerning the duties and responsibilities of various jobs.

  • Provides quantitative score on six basic dimensions.

• Functional job analysis (F J A) questionnaire:

  • A quantitative method for classifying jobs based on amounts of responsibility for data, people, and things. Performance standards and training requirements are also identified.

Observation:

• Watch employees perform their work.

• Record frequency of behaviours.

• Can be structured or unstructured.

• Beneficial when job consists mainly of observable physical activities.

• Less useful for jobs with substantial mental activity.

• PIPTDEA must ensure privacy

Participant diary/log:

• Daily listings made by employees of every activity in which they engage, along with the time each activity takes.

The National Occupational Classification (N O C):

• A reference tool for writing job descriptions and job specifications. Compiled by the federal government, it contains comprehensive, standardized descriptions of about 40,000 occupations and the requirements for each.

• Produced by Employment and Social Development Canada (E S D C).

• Focuses on occupations rather than jobs.

Occupation: A collection of jobs that share some or all of a set of main duties.

4. The information collected in Step 3 is then verified and modified, if required.

• Information should be factually correct and complete.

• Increases validity and reliability.

• Verify with any worker performing the job and with immediate supervisor

5. Job descriptions and specifications are developed based on the verified information.

• Job description:

• A written statement of what the jobholder actually does, how they do it, and under what conditions the job is performed. It includes the duties, responsibilities, reporting relationships, human qualifications, and working conditions of a job—one product of a job analysis.

• No standard format.

Job descriptions usually include:

• Job identification – title, department, location.

• Job summary – major functions and activities.

• Relationships – internal and external.

• Duties and responsibilities – use detail.

• Authority – decisions making.

• Performance standards or indicators.

• Working conditions and physical environment.

Writing competency-based job descriptions:

• Defining the job’s competencies and writing them up involves a process that is similar in most respects to traditional job analysis.

Job descriptions and Human Rights Legislation:

• There is to be no discrimination in any aspect of the terms and conditions of employment.

• Job descriptions are not legally required but advisable.

• Essential job duties should be clear.

• Focus on knowledge, skills and abilities essential for the job.

• May require reasonable accommodation.

Job Specifications:

• A list of the “human requirements”—that is, the requisite knowledge, skills, and abilities—needed to perform the job; another product of a job analysis.

• Clarifies what kind of person to recruit.

• Identify actual physical and mental demands.

• May be based on statistical analysis.

  • Relevance of personality-related traits.

• May involve using the job-requirement matrix.

• Complete the job specification form.

6. The information is then communicated and updated on an as-needed basis.

Once a system is developed to collect data, an organization may choose to:

1. regularly update the data collected in a proactive manner,

2. develop systems to collect data on an ongoing basis,

or

3. adjust job analysis activities in a reactive manner after a significant organizational change is initiated.

The Evolution of Jobs and Job Design

Work Simplification

• Work Simplification is an approach to job design that involves assigning most of the administrative aspects of work (such as planning and organizing) to supervisors and managers, while giving lower-level employees narrowly defined tasks to perform according to methods established and specified by management.

• Evolved from scientific management theory.

Industrial Engineering is a field of study concerned with analyzing work methods; making work cycles more efficient by modifying, combining, rearranging, or eliminating tasks; and establishing time standards.

Business Process Reengineering is redesigning business processes, usually by combining steps, so that small multifunction teams using information technology do

the jobs formerly done by a sequence of departments.

• Identify process to be redesigned.

• Measure performance of existing process.

• Identify opportunities to improve processes.

• Redesign and implement new way of doing the work.

• Assign ownership of task to individual or team.

Job Redesign

• Job enlargement is a technique to relieve monotony and boredom that involves assigning workers additional tasks at the same level of responsibility to increase the number of tasks they have to perform.

• It is also known as horizontal loading.

• Job rotation is a technique to relieve monotony and employee boredom that involves systematically moving employees from one job to another.

• Job enrichment is any effort that redesigns jobs to make an employee’s job more rewarding or satisfying by increasing the opportunities for the worker to experience feelings of responsibility, achievement, growth, and recognition.

  • Also known as vertical loading.

  • Add more meaningful tasks and duties.

Competency-based job analysis:

 is describing a job in terms of the measurable, observable behavioural competencies an employee must exhibit to do a job well.

• Emphasizes what the employee must be able to capable of doing rather than job duties.

• Most job descriptions show combination of competency-based and traditional approaches.

• Competencies are demonstrable characteristics of a person that enable performance of a job.

Three Reasons to Use Competency Analysis

1. To work in a self-motivated way by organizing the work around teams, encouraging team members to rotate freely among jobs (each with its own skill set), pushing more responsibility for things to the workers, and organizing work around projects or processes in which jobs may blend or overlap.

2. Describing the job in terms of the skills, knowledge, and competencies the worker needs is more strategic and develop expertise.

3. Measurable skills, knowledge, and competencies support the employer’s performance management process. Clearly identify basis for training, performance appraisal, and rewards.

How to Write Competency Statements

• Ideally, the competency statement has 3 elements:

• Proficiency Level 1. Identifies project risks and dependencies and communicates routinely to stakeholders.

• Proficiency Level 2. Develops systems to monitor risks and dependencies and report changes.

• Proficiency Level 3. Anticipates changing conditions and impact to risks and dependencies and takes preventive action.