Job Analysis and Its Importance

Job analysis is a systematic procedure of identifying the contents of a job, its important aspects and the qualities and characteristics that a worker needs to be a suitable fit for the job.  So, a properly conducted job analysis helps an organization and its employees to understand what the job is all about, what all tasks it encompasses, the relative importance of those tasks, and the precise characteristics that an employee needs to possess to perform that job successfully.

A job analysis must be reliable and valid. Reliability implies whether the job analysis procedure followed is replicable or not, i.e. when two different job specialists are applying that analysis procedure to a particular job, is it yielding the same result? Or, when the job analysis is carried out at two different points of time, the result varies or remains same? Validity, on the other hand, is the measure of accuracy with which the analysis captures the details of the target job.

Now, how does a job analysis help? What are the areas which can derive some benefit from a properly done job analysis? Job analysis can help in grouping jobs into job families. A job family can comprise those jobs which have similar job requirements, i.e., similar sort of tasks, or it can be made of the jobs which require similar kinds of worker characteristics.  There are two outcomes of a job analysis – job description and person specification. A job description enumerates every task, duty and responsibility that needs to be carried out by that job holder. Person specification specifies the necessary attributes that a person needs to perform that job successfully. Person specification can be categorized into essential criteria and desirable criteria. Essential criteria, as the name implies, denotes those criteria that are critical to the execution of a job – a person holding or opting for that job must be fulfilling those criteria. Some other criteria may not be essential for the execution of job, but they can lead to a superior performance – those are deemed to be desirable criteria. Now since the process of job analysis so minutely outlines the various characteristics needed for average, good or excellent performance on a job, it can help in the recruitment and staffing process by identifying those characteristics that differentiate a superior performer from a good or average performer, characteristics that are easily acquirable while actually working on the job, or characteristics that are common across a pool of applicants or rare to find in the applicant pool. So, it’s evident that a job analysis helps a recruiter to accurately determine the requirements for a job and to have a specific idea of what kind of person he or she is looking for to fill in a vacancy for that job. This helps the recruiter to develop a strategic recruitment plan. Recruiter can have a better idea as to what selection method needs to be used while trying to fill in a vacancy for that job.

Job analysis also helps in identifying training needs and developing training plans. It clearly identifies which characteristics are needed for successful performance on a given job. If an employee shows under-performance or poor-performance, the already identified set of characteristics can serve as a benchmark against which the employee will be evaluated, and the reasons behind his poor performance will be identified. So, if those characteristics which the particular employee is found to be lacking are learnable and acquirable through training, then a proper training plan can be developed.   On a similar note, the identified set of characteristics can be used to develop performance evaluation measures as from these characteristics a standard performance benchmark can be derived.  The well-defined characteristics can also be of help in designing an appropriate compensation plan and in deciding about increments and variable payments.

Thus, it can be concluded that every job requires attention and needs to be analyzed following a systematic methodology as the job analysis acts as a crucial determinant of the execution of the job in a superior manner and as a facilitator for various other related processes in the organization.