Three main components turn a regular old job description into a Smart Job Description.
1. Smart Job Descriptions Incorporate Technology to Map Skills and Behaviors to Jobs
Think about a traditional job description and what is on it. You have some notes about the company, what the role generally entails, some regular tasks, and the required education and experience.
The demonstrated, measurable skills and behaviors that someone needs to have to excel in the role.
These skills and behaviors have a name: competencies.
Competencies are built through extensive job analysis, research, and a structured development process. They consist of leveled indicators to differentiate between basic, intermediate, and advanced performance.
Why are the smartest companies using them?
Because competencies unify all HR processes across the entire employee lifecycle according to one common, measurable framework, they’re an extremely valuable tool to align employees with the organization and their specific roles.
Mapping Skills and Behaviors the Modern Way
In the past, the intensiveness of the competency profiling process, identifying the relevant competencies for a job and mapping them at the appropriate level, has been a barrier for some organizations.
It is finally possible to map and verify the competencies in minutes rather than months and, most importantly, reap the rewards of a unified HR system to grow, shape, and inspire the people who drive your organization forward.
2. Smart Job Descriptions Allow You to Work Smarter, Saving Time and Energy in the Long Run
If you are like most, you might spend time cobbling together bits and pieces from various existing documents or examples you can find on the internet. You email back and forth with a couple of managers. You finish a draft, send it off for approval, and the first manager sends back the doc with notes and comments. You work them in and send it to the hiring manager for sign-off before getting it out.
The hiring manager is super busy, so it takes several days to read it and offer comments. They finally do, so you make the edits.
By this point, you are on version 3 of the document. It’s ready to go! Until the other manager weighs in via email with their feedback on version 1 – and they have got lots of it.
The Smarter Way to Manage Job Descriptions
Everybody wants to spend their time at work intelligently.
Smart job description technology puts the tools in your hands to do so.
We have already talked about mapping the desired skills and behaviors to your job descriptions with the click of a mouse.
Beyond that, smart job description technology completely simplifies your job description creation and management process and adds value in the long run.
CompetencyCore creates a system of interconnected and reusable data, called libraries. So your competencies, for example, are library items, but so are things like responsibilities, education, and certifications. Once you have set things up, drawing on these connected pieces of data saves so much time and energy in creating your job description drafts and helps standardize your entire organization’s job descriptions.
With the job description draft set up, dispatch it within the system to your key stakeholders for input and validation. They spend a few minutes going through it and marking whether they agree or disagree with the individual items. If you are not on the same page, their feedback is captured on the job description again, all within the system.
This way, you capture everyone’s input, all in one place.
Everyone’s using the same platform.
Everything is easy to validate.
With your final version ready to go, you can export your job description to create your job post, and even better, it is prepared to use to support other HR practices.
3. Smart Job Descriptions Can Power Your Entire Employee Lifecycle.
Mapping skills and behaviors competencies to your job descriptions opens up a new world of possibilities for your job descriptions and HR programs.
And having tools that enable you to use job descriptions for something other than job post makes that investment in upfront time pays off in the long run.
With Smart Job Descriptions, you can:
Bring real structure to your hiring and selection process. Carry out structured, behavioral interviews using the “STAR” method (asking the candidate to describe the situation, task, action, and result) to assess candidate-job fit.
Because the interview is based directly on the required skills and behaviors, it keeps interviews more objective and planted in reality. Most importantly, hiring decisions are made based on consistent and standardized criteria.
Set expectations from day one. Once your new hire is on board, have them sign off on their job description in CompetencyCore, so there’s a recorded, clear understanding of expectations on all sides.
Perform regular assessments throughout an employees’ tenure. Later on, HR or department managers can carry out assessments again in the employee’s career, all linked back to that original job description and those required based on the role. That may take the form of self-assessment, supervisor assessment, or the ever-popular 360 assessment, often used in leadership roles.
Map and assign learning resources to continue employees’ development programs. If gaps are identified, the organization can provide employees with learning resources pre-mapped to competencies to develop and strengthen those gaps.
Allow your people to build career paths. One of the most powerful motivators to keep top employees engaged is growth opportunities. With your competencies mapped to every job, there’s total transparency on exactly what skills and behaviors, at what levels your people need to demonstrate to take their next step.