The human resource serves as the frontline of the business in terms of talent and culture. They perform a wide array of tasks that typically, most employees failed to see or is limited to their awareness . In fact, human resource makes sure that the organization and its people are on the same page (goals, long term and short term objectives)
One important skill an HR must have or you may also include executives and department managers is JOB ANALYSIS.
JOB ANALYSIS
Job analysis is the process of studying a job to determine which activities and responsibilities it includes, its relative importance to other jobs, the qualifications necessary for performance of the job and the conditions under which the work is performed.
While there are multiple modalities in which you can analyze a job, in this article we will only be tackling two concepts: Job Dimensions and Task Frequency & Importance
JOB DIMENSIONS
Through the lens of this concept, a job is analyze in four classifications: Physical nature of tasks involve, Sensorimotor tasks, psychomotor tasks, and cognitive tasks
Physical - this type of classification refers to the nature of tasks involving to a specific job that are physical such as lifting, carrying, sending papers, etc. An example of jobs that are very inclined with physical classification are construction workers and janitors.
Sensorimotor - this type of classification refers to the nature of tasks involving to a specific job which mostly require movements and our senses. Examples are chefs and security personnel
Psychomotor - this type of classification refers to the nature of tasks involving to a job that mostly require coordination between our thinking, movement and reaction time. Examples of tasks are, typing, encoding data, data entry and mostly BPO.
Cognitive - this type of classification refers to the nature of tasks involving to a job that mostly require higher cognitive thinking such as decision making, analytical skills, analyzing data, decisions that can make a big impact in the company positively or negatively. Examples of these jobs are Managers, HRs, Executives.
Upon knowing these classifications, you may try analyzing your own job, look at the job description and classify each tasks, whether they are physical, sensorimotor, psychomotor, or cognitive. And finally, check what particular classification is dominant in your job as a whole? Try it, its fun!
The graph below shows the analysis of an HR Generalist role.
You can clearly see that the distribution is leaning to the right, which means that most tasks are very cognitive.
What can we get from the illustration?
It goes to show that the position performs wide amount of tasks which can create a notion that in the point of view of a manager, one might need to add more people in order for the department to have smooth sailing process.
JOB FREQUENCY AND IMPORTANCE
These two concepts come along with one another and must not be separated. Frequency simply refers to how frequent a specific task is performed:
0- not performed
1- every few months to yearly
2- every few weeks to monthly
3- every few days to weekly
4 - every few hours to daily
5- hourly to many times each hour
Importance on the other hand simply refers to how important a specific task is in the job as a whole:
0- not performed
1- not important
2- somewhat important
3- important
4- very important
5- extremely important
Examine each task and analyze the relationship between the two.
This graph is an example of illustrating the relationship of tasks in terms of their frequency. Looking at the graph, we can see that task 7 tells us that its an important task but not really that performed often.
FROM JOB ANALYSIS TO RECRUITMENT
Most job analyst would suggest that the more cognitive or psychomotor inclined the tasks, the higher the stakes their job holds, more critical, more impactful in the business.
Job analysis outputs will give insights to executives, HRs and managers in structuring the salary brackets, compensation and benefits.
For recruitment, one can strategize more in assessing applicants, if tasks are more cognitive, the pre-assessments are expected to be more on IQ, logical reasoning, etc. Interviews are more rigorous unlike jobs that are physical in nature, you might use pre-employment assessments that are "lighter" and interviews that are not "nerve wracking"