Welcome to our discussion of job analysis and rewards. In many ways this discussion is overdue. Job Analysis informs as I've noted in past lectures, in our legal defense ability. So has clear implications for legal compliance. And it certainly plays into planning as well in that we need to know kind of what jobs we're planning for.
So I'd like to take a moment this week to reconsider our class goal and I've alluded to this at various points. I think and overarching goal here is to earn a seat at the table right? What do I mean when I say that? Make sure HR has a legitimate contribution to the leadership of an organization. So we have here you know a shot from Lord of the Rings, the Council of Elrond, there is a table here it's quite small. But you get the idea right we aren't just going through material here for the sake of knowledge, we're going through material with the desire to apply this knowledge in a meaningful and beneficial way to the organizations that you support as HR professionals. What is especially important when we think about earning a seat the table. What's especially important is keeping in mind the link that HR strategy has with organizational strategy. When we think back to our staffing organizations model which is shown once more on our next slide, near the top of it we see this link between HR strategy and organizational strategy. So we want to be interacting, we want to be informed about what our business does, how it makes money and in ensuring our HR strategies, interact to meet those goals. Right now we're coming back down into the weeds for our job analysis lecture here. But these things, these skills that you're learning are ways that when linked well with organizational strategy, HR can add real value. So the organization that you work for probably isn't keen on doing job analysis themselves, they are going to look to you for how this should be done and how that adds value. This is what are the various support activities where HR can really earn its place at the table by having a skill that they can then look at through the lens of organizational strategy and find out how do we best leverage a skill for the organization.
Very briefly I want to call attention once again to where we are at in our staffing organizations model. So we are clearly under support activities and as I noted, job analysis is very important to these other support activities even, and in some ways we might say that job analysis supports legal compliance and planning as well as the core staffing activities central to what we do as HR professionals in that we need to know the jobs that we are supporting in the organizations we work for. And to the degree we don't have a clear understanding of what those jobs are, it's going to be very hard to recruit, select, and make employment, decisions. We'll also be in not as of good as a position for planning and not as legally defensible. So job analysis is very important and while this is not a class on compensation, we'll certainly talk about how we gather information about what is most rewarding to employees and try to link up that information for making good reward decisions, making good reward packages for our employees.
So what is job analysis? The book defines it as the process of studying jobs in order to gather, analyze synthesize and report information about job requirements and rewards. So we're going to dive into just what it means analyze, gather, synthesize, report. There's a lot of specifics to job analysis. And there's three main types that were going to each cove in the subsequent slides and those are job requirements, competency based and job rewards, job analysis.
This next slide is from your book, exhibit 4.1. Now I'll let you make sure you'll write up on this material but my summary of the purpose of each type of job analysis is that when it comes to job requirements we're really talking about or trying to protect ourselves and we're thinking a lot about selection. How do we select for a specific job in our organizations. So this is clearly about person job fit in trying to make good decisions in support of that. When it comes to competency based job analysis, we're thinking about links to organizational strategy. So competency based goes more to the organizational so we're looking at person organization fit to some degree. And then job rewards is really focusing on both the recruiting of new employees and then the retaining of our existing employees. So we want to know you know what rewards matter to our employees. So you might observe that these all have their place in an organization right? They're all kind of meeting specific information needs and so ideally these are used together.
Now jobs are changing and we've already talked in Past lectures about the rise of alternative work arrangements, various ways that technology changes jobs but it's helpful to review these again because sets the stage for some of the challenges of job analysis and that jobs aren't static. So when we make a static document, because that's what we're doing with job analysis, it's going to have a problem whenever things are changing and so the technology, the rise of flexible work arrangements, the rise of team based work, and the use ever more so of other duties as assigned aspects of job descriptions, all claim the fact that it's hard to nail down specifically what people are always doing. So we'll talk about ways to do that, ways we can still achieve it, but the end of the day we want to keep in mind job analysis must be able to adapt to changing conditions. And this is where we'll see some of the appeal of competency based job analysis in a little while.
Okay first let's head into job requirements job analysis and this really is the work force if you will of job analysis. This is traditionally what we would think of when we think of job analysis is job requirements, requirements job analysis. But again from a legal defense ability standpoint, having a clear idea and understanding of the job requirements in organization is very important and so this is going to inform all that. The definition of job requirements job analysis you'll notice is very similar to that of job analysis, it's this gathering, analyzing, synthesizing, reporting information but again specifically now about job requirements only. So were trying to delineate the specific knowledge skills, abilities and other characteristics that jobs require.
The next slide here is my take on exhibit 4.2 in the book. The purpose of this figure is to show you what job requirements job analysis is all about and the process behind it. Unfortunately, the book model is a bit convoluted and so simplified it just a bit here because of that. And what I want you to see is really how job requirements job analysis is made up of two paths that produce slightly different things. So you have a resulting job description and job specification based on these two paths. These two components are typically combined into a single document. The job description is going to be all about the job where as the job specification is going to be about really the person and the qualities of the person necessary to perform the job. So what we do here is we identify tasks in the context of the job and that gives us our description of the job, so job specific here. The top of the two horizontal paths that you see in the figure here. Then you also have to infer the knowledge, skills, abilities and other characteristics that the person who would perform this job should possess. So that's going to lead to job specification where specify knowledge, skills, abilities, other of the person who would ideally be selected to perform this job. Most of how we're going to put these two things together. I want to note as well that job requirements job analysis and can look at different levels of analysis. In other words, we can just start with observable tasks that are really independent of just a job. We can feed those up into a specific job and then we can also look at job requirements that span different jobs and so those are getting at job families. At the end of the day though when we think about jobs spanning job analysis, were typically going to concern ourselves with competency based analysis. So job requirements is typically going to focus on the job level right in the middle of this hierarchy.
The job requirements matrix is very helpful for us to understand job requirements job analysis. What it shows are the key components of job requirements job analysis into some level you can even come to get the process flow that must occur in order to put this all together. First off you need to identify tasks of the job. And we start specific right, so this is sub components of a job, they're not the entire job. So we're going to define specific tasks and then those we can, if we choose, put into task dimensions. So task dimensions would be ways that we go up one level and try to speak beyond tasks and you categorize them together. So you can see here they've given supervision and word processing as task dimensions after they built out specific tasks that kind of fit cleanly under each of these categories. You can then identify the importance of each task dimension using the various methods. And in this case they have given the percentage of time spent and use that as a proxy important to that dimension. You might see on this slide and if you think back to your previous slide, what's going on here with the task is the identification state. We're identifying tasks that make up the job and then we can move forward to infer the knowledge, skills, abilities and other characteristics of individuals who would perform this job. At this point in further the KSAOs and then we can rate their importance and again there's different ways to do this. So you see the left side of the job requirements matrix is about the job, the work whereas the right side as about the worker or the person ideal for the job. You might take a moment as well to try to recall what's missing from this matrix that is shown in the book. I'll give you second to maybe try to recall that. So what's missing here is the job context. So typically you'd also want to provide the context for the job and that's provided at the bottom of the job requirements matrix in the book. So we talk about where the job is carried out and whether there are any hazards on the job, et. cetera.
So what would an ideal task statement look like? So in addition to the content provided here, which is in the book, there's some additional points of guidance on task statements. One would be to use action verbs that have only one meaning. If you look at the previous slide you know there's the action verb prepare. Prepare could mean different things but they do give a nice modifying noun, they're going to say, prepare graphs. So the idea is you just want to be specific about what's going on. At the end of the day though there is of course balance that has to go into effect here as far as not creating too many tasks statements and kind of getting into the weeds of the trivialities. Probably the most challenging thing to do with task statements is to try to find it reliability. And what we need here is if different subject matter experts, so different people that are intimately familiar with this job, were to come up with task statements, would they come up with the same wants. And this is kind of a hard threshold to reach because people often have different perspectives on the job. But what good looks like here is to at least look at the task statements that various subject matter experts come up with to describe a job and at least find those statements that are repeated.
How do we assess the importance of tasks and task dimensions? Keep in mind that we're focused on what the job requires, not what the worker offers here. This isn't about the KSAOs, it's about what tasks and task dimensions make up the job requirements. We can use likert scales here where we might rate on a 1 to 5 or 1 to 7 scale, a relative time spent or the importance to overall performance. Or we could just rate just the percentage of time spent, a nice easy way to quantify time, might not get at the actual importance though right, there might be some tasks that take a lot of time. But in the end they aren't actually as important as of some tasks that you might have to do with less time. And then there's also just a dichotomous yes no type way where we might say, is this a need for new employees to be trained in.
Now when it comes to workers' specifications we are concerned with KSAOS, knowledge, skills, abilities and other. And Onet is a great resource to develop understanding here, so you click the link provided to own it to go to the Onet content model which I pictured here on the slide, you can see that the Onet content model has under the worker oriented, the top half of the model, worker characteristics which includes abilities. So there's the ‘A' and then under worker requirements as both skills and knowledge. And under experience requirements, you'd certainly have some examples of what are commonly fit under other characteristics. So you have licensure and things like that but then you also have the job oriented side here, so job requirements that are found broadly across certain occupations. And so that's all captured on a content model, so if you click on any job that onet released, the vast majority of the jobs on Onet, you will find it detailed information and ratings on all of these. Many of the ratings come from job incumbents, some come from subject matter experts. But in general Onet is moving towards having job incumbent data on all jobs. The short story is Onet is a great resource to develop your own understanding of that definitions behind knowledge, skills, abilities, and other. And even to think about the breadth of the other category and also to just understand the KSAOs demanded among US jobs.
We talked about assessing the importance of task statements and dimensions already. What about assessing KSAO importance for a job? Well we can go about in a similar way. We can have Likert scales where we rate the importance to a certain level of task performance. Or again we can just make the dichotomous question, is this necessary for assessment during recruitment selection. So this is kind of a high bar. Once again the ideal here would be to find reliability amongst several subject matter experts where they are consistently saying that yes, this KSAO should be assessed during recruitment and selection or no it should not. So agreement among subject matter experts would be very helpful here.
When we get to collecting job requirements information, there are multiple methods and sources that we can use and ideally would use a mix of methods and sources to try to get the best data. So you can review these in your textbook but I will just point out, when it comes to methods, prior information includes Onet. Onet is a great way to get the information without a lot of work. So you'll need to certainly use other sources and methods to get specific to the jobs in your organization after you start from Onets, more occupational level work analysis. I'd point out that with the task questioners this includes the PAQ, the position analysis questionnaire. Your book talks about this for a while and this has a long history and it's been used across many jobs in the United States so there's a lot of data and it provides a standardized way to conduct job analysis in your firm. So that can often be a good starting point. But again multiple methods and sources is kind of the key here. Part of this is because you measure different aspects of performance with different methods and different sources. Of course you have to keep in mind cost and time as you try to find the optimal balance between the methods and sources. I'll point out here as the book does that synthetic validation is something can be used as well in validating job requirements. Validating job requirements would mean seeing how they relate to performance. So the idea here is that experts would rate how different measures measure given job requirements. Okay so how different measures get at or measure the performance on given job requirements. So experts might find that a paper and pencil test can measure intelligence and certain parts of job performance that are closely linked intelligence. But they might find that you also need for certain jobs, a test of eye and hand coordination. And that the intelligence test doesn't get that so in order to figure out the job requirement of how much hand eye coordination one has, for example military job, it might require a physical test of some sort where you're able to ascertain an individual applicants' hand eye coordination. Different methods and synthetic validation though can help rate the expected validity that you're going to get on these things without having to go through a large study to actually collect the data. So the real data would always be better but sometimes you just ask experts who have been in the job, know what works well on the job for employees and these experts can rate and help us determine what tests and what methods would be the best way to get at and to measure certain job requirements.