How Job Descriptions Can Improve Your Talent Management

Get rid of your job descriptions – or maybe don’t

The Job Description is Obsolete is the title of a recent article in Forbes magazine. They argue that writing down responsibilities, duties, and qualifications is ineffective and even harmful to the organization. Is that generally true?  Most job descriptions are being created for operational HR tasks such as compensation, recruiting, or selection, with a focus on compliance or to fulfill industry rules. These types of job descriptions have certainly become irrelevant. They describe a job as a static set of tasks and qualifications with little reference to the dynamic world in which they are being performed in. Therefore, They are no help in dealing with today’s challenges, such as people development or strategic workforce planning. If you use these types of job descriptions in your company, then yes, you absolutely should get rid of them.

 

Instead, improve your job descriptions to boost your talent management

However, instead of throwing out the baby with the bathwater, you can simply improve your job descriptions in a way that boosts your entire talent management. Why invest in a whole new process if you have such a valuable tool already at hand?

Today, organizations with integrated talent management use job descriptions to set hiring thresholds and communicate performance expectations. They serve as an important building block of job architectures that feed into the strategic workforce and succession planning, in many cases even for leadership and career development.

These companies store all documentation that comes with a job, such as competency profiles, compensation data, performance measures, career paths, or compliance classifications, in one single, structured place. This allows them to create all job descriptions based on the same data, terminology, and criteria. They become comparable, written statements of tasks, expectations, and potential career paths that serve employer and employee alike. A little bit of care in writing your job descriptions will then boost your talent management activities to a whole other level without any large investment. How do you get there?

 

Recruiting and retaining talent

Job descriptions need to contain all and the correct job requirements. Then they can be used as solid foundation for interviews and enable the selection of the most suitable candidates. Looking at it the other way around, candidates will understand better what the tasks and responsibilities are, reducing the risk of job dissatisfaction, increasing talent retention, and lowering turnover.

Job descriptions should also include the required skills and competencies because they enable employees to compare their own skills with the skillset required for the job they aim at. Publishing the open positions in your company together with the required skillsets in your internal talent marketplace can then improve internal mobility and employee engagement.

 

Performance Management

Include carefully defined achievement goals for career progression in your job descriptions. This gives line managers a transparent baseline to determine how far the work of an employee reflects the goals of a job, measure their performance correctly and consistently, and give adequate feedback. The only precondition is for the job descriptions to be up-to-date and comparable with others. But that’s easy if they are all based on the same criteria. It will make performance management a truly ongoing activity and significantly more transparent and flexible, a valuable feat in any agile work environment.

 

Learning and development

If job descriptions contain skills and they are actively being used for performance management then they can serve as the basis for planning learning and development activities. Together, both allow an organization to detect where their employees stand and where they would like them to be, in other words identifying skill gaps. A reliable skill map is probably the best way to prepare for future requirements. You can set the right training objectives and help employees develop knowledge and competencies in the most important areas.

Compensation

Different jobs have different complexity and require different skill levels. They’re, therefore, graded and paid differently. If your job descriptions are based on the same criteria, compensation teams can easily use the job descriptions to compare and evaluate job profiles to make fair compensation decisions. A compensation structure based on comparable job descriptions will be transparent for employers and employees and strengthen talent attraction and retention.

Succession planning

Effective succession planning relies on a deep understanding of all aspects of a job profile and a good overview of available talent in the organization. Well-written job descriptions will help in this situation because they can easily identify a talent pool, and the process runs smoother.

 

 In practice, job descriptions are indeed many times obsolete. When was the last time that you looked at your own? If your job description offers the above-mentioned features, you might look at it regularly. The three most important things to keep in mind are to make them comprehensive (containing all data about a job), comparable (based on the same criteria and terminology), and up-to-date. Then, you’re set for significant improvements in HR operations without any large investment.