Importance of Job Descriptions in Position Management
Picture this: You’re sifting through your inbox (Since when did it get so full?) and jotting down a plan to tackle all your to-dos. You start to feel a little overwhelmed but still confident you can achieve it all. Then you open the final e-mail. The executive team wants to build a new department within your organization. With it comes a heap of new jobs. You’ve been copied on the e-mail with several other recipients. It’s unclear whose job it will be to tackle this project and create job descriptions. You don’t even know where to begin. This is where position management and a strong job description management process can help you move forward with these plans.
What is position management in HR?
Position management is a way to create, organize, and update the positions within your workforce. Well-executed position management can help organizations:
- Plan labor forecasting;
- Recruit and hire easier;
- Create organizational structures;
- Keep accurate incumbent data and historical records;
- Create reports on recruitment, turnover, and other trends; and
- Define the responsibilities and attributes of each role.
Position management is necessary when scaling a business. With it, you can ensure your organization has the necessary roles to manage upcoming workloads while ensuring every employee is working to their full potential.
According to The Future of Jobs Report 2023 from the World Economic Forum, the skills that are increasing in importance are not always reflected in the organization’s upskilling strategy. Competency-based position management is necessary to align organizational needs with learning and development outcomes and ensuring the business has the skills inventory necessary to grow and achieve its goals.
How is a position different from a job?
To understand position management, you need to first understand what “position” means. People are often more familiar with the word “job” or use “job” and “position” interchangeably. Really, though, they’re two parts of a larger picture.
A job lays out the requirements for a specific role, such as the necessary duties, responsibilities, qualifications, and competencies. You can think of a job as a single crop (such as a cornfield) on a farm with a variety of different crops (the entire organization).
A position is a specific occurrence of the job and a container for an employee to fill. It represents the specific individual who is performing the job in a specific context. In the farm analogy, a position would be the individual plant within the specific crop (such as a corn stalk). The general guidelines for the position are taken from the job description, but the position itself further specifies the conditions of the role: for example, chain of command, department, salary grade, and employment type. There may be multiple positions within each job, but each position can only be associated with one job. Likewise, each position can only be occupied by one employee, but each employee can occupy multiple positions (if they perform more than one role within the organization).
Position management starts with job descriptions.
Job descriptions are essential for managing the positions within your organization. Because each position is based on a job, each job should have a clear and accurate description. So, job descriptions should be your first priority when building new roles or sectors within your organization.
Building job descriptions within a competency framework supports position management. With competencies, you can clearly and objectively create succession plans and forecast labor demands. In our State of Competencies 2024 report, 68.4% of respondents said their job descriptions have competencies attached to them. If you are not already using competencies in your job descriptions, you may risk having a faulty position management process with redundancies and inaccuracies.
Technology can help support position and job description management initiatives and save on overall costs. Part of successful position management in a large organization is grouping jobs into job families. Additionally, more people leaders are gravitating towards talent management and competency management solutions to organize and lead their workforce. Having job description software like Quinto that integrates into these other software solutions and enables you to create and manage job families helps streamline processes and reduce errors.
Job description management goes beyond defining the role. You must also ensure that job descriptions are stored properly, regularly reviewed, and kept up to date. This process involves collaborating with subject matter experts to validate accuracy and revisions for each job description.
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Who should lead your job description creation process?
When it comes to creating job descriptions, some organizations rely on an HR professional or a hiring manager. However, involving only one employee in the task limits the job description to one viewpoint. HR views positions from a macro level—the role the job description plays in the lifecycle of the employee. They could miss the finer details at the micro level—the specific job responsibilities and competencies known to someone in the field. On the other hand, hiring managers often focus on the micro level and can miss the bigger picture at the macro level. Ideally, HR, hiring managers, and an incumbent currently occupying a position in the job should collaborate to create and update job descriptions.
How to Decide Who Should Lead Your Job Description Creation Process
Select the right person for the task based on their experience, perspective, and background with job descriptions. You should also evaluate the employee based on:
- Relevance: The employee should have a strong working knowledge of the job description project. HR professionals and hiring managers are a good fit for this reason. Those less knowledgeable about the project could end up creating a poorly designed system.
- Specialized training: The employee should have specialized training related to job description management. Proper training should include practical tips that can be used at work, strategies on using job descriptions within the talent lifecycle, and real-world practice in creating quality job descriptions.
- Involvement in employee development plans: Job descriptions are more than just a resource for hiring. The employee should be able to integrate job descriptions into future employee development plans and career pathing. Not only is learning and development opportunities a reason for employees to stay, growth also supports a healthy work culture.
In addition to choosing the right person to lead the job creation process, you should also select a single person to manage the system you house job descriptions on. This way, stored information is maintained properly, and new information is only added when needed.
Job Descriptions That Support Position Management
With accurate, competency-based job descriptions, you can establish clear guidelines for the positions in your company and prepare your workforce for the future. With AI-empowered and expert-curated content on Quinto, you can create effective job descriptions in minutes—not hours. Get job descriptions that grow with your business and stay aligned to your organization’s core values with Quinto. Request a demo today.
