[MUSIC] So this video I'm going to start off with a bit of a story about something that happened to me to illustrate the importance of job analysis. I had just started at my last job and I hadn't been there very long and, I got a phone call that nobody wants to get, and that was that an employee had been injured. He had his hand caught in a machine. Well, of course the first thing you do, is you make sure the employee is taken care of and safe. Of course, right afterwards, we need to analyze that job. Need to figure out what caused the incident. And so we conducted what's called a job hazard analysis, a type of job analysis, and went through the steps that maybe contributed to that injury and then tried to think of ways to prevent it in the future. So that's the focus of this video. Safety is one thing, one reason why we use job analysis. But certainly there's other things too, like compensation, performance management, or again, the focus of this course, recoupment and selection. Why do we need to do a job analysis to ensure a better hire? So, let's take a look. >> Job analysis has been around a long time. If you watch Professor John Budd's videos on the history of human resource management early in Module One, you saw that during the industrial revolution people like Frederick Taylor started to analyze jobs to make them more efficient. These days human resource professionals use job analyses for many purposes, but the primary reason is to gather critical information about a job. This information is then used to construct a job description which we will discuss in a later module. Some people may feel that analyzing jobs is kind of antiquated because of the rapid pace of change in the business environment but despite the short shelf life of job descriptions, meaning jobs do change, we still need to take a look at jobs even though they change, and I will outline the reasons why in this video, but it's important to note that when done correctly, the results of a job analysis insure applicants can fully understand the requirements of a job allowing them to perhaps even self select out if needed. Meaning they look at the requirements of the job and say, hey that's not what I'm interested in, or that's not for me, I'm not qualified for that job. They may also be used when a job changes, such as with the implementation of a new product or technology. It's important that all job descriptions be kept up to date, so that current employees understand their expectations and new employees can be properly selected based on the job requirements, but it's really not practical for an organization to analyze every job all the time. So it maybe would make more sense for you to do buckets of jobs on a rolling basis. Revisiting jobs every few years or so to stay current. All right, so let's take a look at some of the uses of job analysis. Why might we want to dig in and understand more about what a job actually entails? Well the first one is job design and redesign. So we want to set up a job in the beginning that is rewarding, motivating, safe, efficient, all of these different things. So we want to look to see how should we design the job, and then also redesign a job. So certainly things like we've talked about before, they change quite rapidly and we want to be able to rework a position. Maybe we want to rework it for efficiencies, maybe we need to rework it because the competencies have changed for what's required for the job based on new technology. So those kinds of things. Next we also want to take a look at recruitment and selection. There are many uses of job analysis in recruitment and selection. For instance, I need to have a job description of some sort so I know what I'm hiring for. It helps me write an employment advertisement. It helps me develop structured interview questions. And, also, what selection tools I'll be using should be based on job competencies that I can get from the job description that came from the job analysis. Next is performance appraisal. I need to know what to evaluate employees on in terms of their behaviors based on what the job entails. Another area is compensation. I need to make sure that we are compensating people correctly, and if we are a company that pays what the market pays, then I want to compare the job within the organization to another job outside of the organization, and sometimes titles don't really, they're not very telling, so in one company you call someone a vice president of marketing, another company it's called a director of marketing. Maybe they have the exact same duties, you just use different titles. So now with the job analysis I know exactly what that person does, so I can compare apples to apples, because wages are expensive and a large company that even pays 1% more than it has to for its employees for the salaries could be millions every year so we really want to watch how much we are spending and making sure that we're still competitive. Next is safety and again, I share in another video an unfortunate story where an employee was seriously injured at work. And the first thing I did was to do a job hazard analysis. So of course that's a bit reactive, after an accident happens, but we want to look at all of our jobs for safety purposes, to to ensure that we are putting works in safe positions giving them the correct PPE, personal protection equipment, these kinds of things, making sure all things are labeled properly in terms of chemicals and things that the employee will come into contact with. All of our procedures are documented and all of this can be done through job analysis. Understanding exactly it is that the job does. Now post accident, that's where we do the job hazard analysis or I should the kind of a post accident review and we can go through that process as well to make sure those things don't happen again. We can use job analysis in training and development of employees in a few different ways. One is we can train people for the current positions that they have and making sure that they have the knowledge, skills, abilities, all these things to complete those jobs and then also development of people into future jobs. So if I know what jobs entail, then I can help grow and develop employees, give them the skill sets they need. Education whatever it is, for future jobs as well. And last but not least on our list here, are legal issues and there's several but let's just discuss two and one is the American with Disabilities Act. We need to be able to differentiate by understanding the job through job analysis. What's an essential function and what's a non essential function. So with essential functions that may be something that you would not have to accommodate someone with a disability because it's a critical function, the job exists to do that. So first we have to know what are they. The other issue that comes up with job descriptions Is related to discrimination so whats a bonified occupational qualification, meaning what is something that is a work requirement that is actually related to something like race, color, religion, sex, national origin that's actually legal so for instance not hiring a priest to lead a Jewish synagogue would be a bonified occupational qualification. Maybe you have a position where some is a particular age and they are not hired for a position, so for instance age can be a bonified occupational qualification in certain transportation jobs like pilots there's a mandatory Retirement age in the United States for pilots and that's because of safety reasons, so when people age, you have eye sight issues, you're more likely to have stroke and other kinds of heart disease and all these things. And so its sort of in the interest of safety. But we have to know what the job entails for us to determine if something is a bona-fide occupational qualification. So here's a quick list of the different kinds of job analysis, and we'll take a look at each one as we move through the slides. The first method of job analysis is job performance, actually participating in the job itself. This could involve assisting on the line in a manufacturing plant, laying concrete alongside a job worker, construction worker. And this provide a job analyst first hand experience to the job. And you can see here the pros. You actually have exposure to the job. And it's good for jobs that are learned very quickly. But there are some cons. It would be pretty dangerous for someone without a lot of training to do certain jobs. So it's not great for hazardous jobs. And in terms of a disadvantage, it may be an efficiency concern because an analyst may need to spend several hours or even days participating in a job across various conditions in order to get the full picture. And we'd have to ask, if that is an efficient use of that person's time? Here again in observation you have actual exposure to the job, and unlike the last one, job performance, this doesn't require a lot of training time, because you're just watching someone do it. The disadvantages would be that it's not completely ideal, because for jobs that require a lot of mental thought, you obviously can't observe that. And so the other thing too is that people may change their behaviors. So if you're like me and someone's watching me work I tend to kind of screw up. Also in terms of behaviors people may show that they are much safer than they normally are because someone's watching you. So for instance in a job hazard or if you're observing someone actually doing a job and you're doing a safety analysis then you might not get really true results. They might be contaminated by the fact that the person is changing their behavior and acting much more safe In that particular time period. Another method of gathering job information is to ask incumbents. Those are already perform in the job everyday. because who knows best about the job that an actual worker doing it. An analyst can select a handful of employees and ask them about their days, what they do? How they do it? It's pretty informal typically face to face. A major advantage of this is that allows the analyst to gather a lot of good information. They can gather everything you're looking for because all they need to do is ask. And what better source, again, than the person doing the job? There are some cons to this as well. Incumbents may not be 100% truthful. Whether intentional or unintentional, and they may not like being questioned. It may cause them to be worried like why are you asking me about my job? Am I going to get laid off or fired? To get the best responses, it is important for the analyst to explain what they're looking for and how the information will be used allowing them to gather all the information they need. Next is critical incident analysis and that's defined as an incident within a job that doesn't happen a lot, it's not very frequent, but it's still important for a worker to be aware of and be prepared for. For example a flight attendant typically handles greeting customers, explaining safety procedures, assisting with luggage, all these different things. They must also be able to handle emergency situations as well. Such as, passenger medical emergencies. They would not typically picked up, these kinds of things would not typically be picked up during the three previous methods because, they're out of the norm. For instance the day that you go and observe a flight attendant may be pretty uneventful. It's not going to be the day that someone has a medical emergency. So critical incident analysis is typically something that is documented by supervisors. They may be kept track of by employees. But they're also called out in job interviews, interviewing employees about their jobs, and also through performance reviews, finding some of these moments that really stand out, that are worth mentioning. And so an advantage of this method is that it is very focused on the actions of employees. Allowing the analyst to understand mental and physical requirements of the job, but a disadvantage is that it's pretty time consuming given the nature of interviewing. And it might be hard for the analyst to identify what the critical incidents actually are. What makes this one critical versus something else, if the person is not necessarily familiar with the job? Another method of job analysis is a structured questionnaire. It compiles data from the worker about their job and is pretty efficient and cheap, you can give it to a lot of employees at once. It does take a bit of time to develop and, again, there might be some distortion of responses if employees do not take the test seriously or they want to over-inflate what their duties are due to, maybe, they're worried about what the test will be used for or what the information will be used for. The last one here is the position analysis questionnaire. I do encourage you to check this one out. I've used it in the past and I really like it. This questionnaire is a little bit more qualitative than the one I just mentioned where you're just filling out sort of a bubble sheet. This is more of an interview, a paper interview, if you will, where you're asking someone many different components of their job, general duties, what's needed in terms of day to day mental processes and work output. The context in which they work, who they work with. So, there's a number of different pieces here. I have used this in a setting where I needed to gather a lot of information about what jobs were changing due to technology. And what I did was so again trying to back up here. There's a number of methods and it's not necessarily one right method it really depends on the situation. But for me, what I found to be really helpful was a combination. I use the Position Analysis Questionnaire to begin with and then I followed up with interviews, and I did focus group interviews. So, I'd bring in three or four, five employees in a focus group based on the results of the position analysis questionnaire, I'd ask them follow-up questions. And then also too, when you have kind of a group like that, if I'm looking at all these different questionnaires, and I'm talking to people, it helps me identify some of the outliers. Those who say, well this task takes five hours, and someone says it takes one hour. But I have a bunch of people in the middle, so It's really helpful for that as well to get a better understanding of what people actually do.
