Jim Higgins

When it comes to the recruitment process, you don’t just want to hire the most adequate candidate. You want to choose the one who will enhance the company’s culture, adaptability, productivity, and diversity as much as possible. Yet despite your best intentions, there’s a good chance that you have a “let me tell you about a bad hiring decision we made” story.

Where does the applicant selection process go awry most often? In many organizations, one problem lies with flawed pre-employment assessments that were based on inadequate job analysis information. In some cases, hiring managers even went rogue after receiving assessment results they didn’t like. Either way, bad hires slip through the cracks and wind up taking too long to train, hurt morale, and contribute less than needed to the workflow. When it comes time to terminate them, the procedure can be highly difficult and time-consuming for the employer.

Obviously, the best way to avoid these scenarios is by relying on scientifically backed hiring assessment instruments that have been run through proven and vigorous test development and validation frameworks. However, before you can have an assessment that results in high-quality personnel selection and withstands legal challenges, you need to conduct a job analysis for each open position.

Why Is Job Analysis Important?

Comprehensive, valid job analysis serves as the basic fabric of one or more pre-employment assessments. In essence, the job analysis is an in-depth study of the requirements of the job to be filled.

For instance, a strong job analysis would identify the specific duties or tasks that an employee would need to perform while working in the role. That’s not all, though. The job analysis also would outline the specific knowledge, skills, or abilities (KSAs) required to perform those duties. Because the job analysis has been built on objective data, it can be used to develop tests. Candidates’ test results should reliably predict who will be more likely to succeed.

Here’s the issue, though: Organizations consistently make missteps when pulling together their job analysis information. As a result, they wind up with assessments that are weak at best and biased at worst. To avoid problems, be sure that your company engages in the following best practices.

1. Decide whether you need a job analysis.

The steps in job analysis creation take time and effort, leading many busy recruiters to ask, “Do we really need this vehicle to help us hire?” The answer is that it depends.

If you are fine relying upon your current hiring assessment tools, even if they aren’t correct, compliant, or informed, you don’t have to undergo a job analysis. On the other hand, if you want to be absolutely certain that your minimum job qualifications legally and reliably help you pick great employees, you need a job analysis.

2. Spend time interviewing subject matter experts.

Subject matter experts can provide you with a true wealth of insight when it comes to composing a job analysis. SMEs have a deep understanding of the job at hand. Maybe they worked in the role before or are currently working in a similar position. Getting their feedback and input will ensure that you don’t miss anything on your job analysis.

What are some questions to pose to your SMEs? You may want to start with a walk-through of a “typical” day. This can serve as the starting point to ask about tools used during the work, interactions with other departments and management, and how the SME would describe the successful completion of a project or responsibility. Don’t limit your questions to what you see on the SME’s job description, though. Most employees handle tasks that never make it to job descriptions.

3. Craft a job analysis survey.

With your SME information in hand, you can design a job analysis survey. The survey results will support the data that you’ve gathered from SMEs. Once you’ve finished with your survey, you’ll be able to administer it to a healthy sample of employees and supervisors.

It’s worth mentioning that the data from the SMEs and the survey can be used beyond the construction of pre-employment assessments. Recruiters frequently leverage this logical, unbiased information to standardize structured interviews. Structured interviews, when used in conjunction with assessments, can ensure consistency in the fair treatment and evaluation of all candidates.

4. Interpret the data from your job analysis survey.

The responses you receive from your job analysis survey should give you transparent insight into the requirements of the job itself. What if you measure the survey against your expectations and find gaps? Consider yourself lucky. It’s better to find an issue when you cross-validate all your data than to realize an error later in the process.

For example, let’s say you find out that your original KSAs aren’t in alignment with the ones you’ve identified after interviewing SMEs, getting worker feedback, and parsing your survey information. At that point, you can make revisions and corrections that will become the foundational elements of your pre-employment testing framework.

You can’t afford to hire on instinct, unstructured interviews, or questionable assessments. In today’s heavily regulated and competitive business environment, you need pre-employment tests that both hold up to scrutiny and indicate which candidates are likely to become excellent employees. And having valid, well-rounded job analyses serve as the foundation for those tests is absolutely essential.