Application Case 4
APPLICATIONS Integrating Competencies and Job Requirements
The analysis of work for staffing requires attention to both person/organization and person/job matches. Staffing specialists and HR executives can put these pieces together by becoming knowledgeable about both top-down (competency) and bottom-up (job requirements) methods of analyzing work. To understand this process, select an organization you are familiar with. It can be your school, your workplace, or an organization where you would like to work. Within that workplace, identify at least three different jobs at various levels as a starting point. For example, you might study administrative staff, professors, and deans at a university; customer service representatives, managers, and executives in a retail environment; waitstaff, cooks, and managers at a restaurant; nurses, doc-tors, and administrators at a hospital, and so on. To conduct the competency portion of the analysis, review the material in the chapter and create a plan for learning about job-spanning competencies. Deter-mine who is most likely to have the relevant information and, if possible, contact at least three people in the organization who can provide relevant information on competencies. Pay particular attention to the organization’s strategic goals, mission, and cultural profile when collecting this information. This information can be supplemented by looking at the organization’s website or annual reports. To conduct the job requirements portion of the analysis, again review the relevant material in the chapter and create a plan for learning about job requirements and their associated KSAOs. If possible, contact at least three people in the organization who can describe their own jobs. Pay particular attention to the tasks individuals complete regularly, evaluate the relative proportion or time of each task, and then match tasks to KSAOs. This information can be supplemented by looking at O*NET.
Once you have the information on competencies and job requirements, evaluate the following questions:
1. What differences did you find in the process of collecting information? Did you identify different KSAOs from your competency model relative to your job requirements analysis?
2. How does job requirements information give additional insight above and beyond what you learned from competency modeling? How does competency modeling give additional insight above and beyond what you learned from job requirements information?
3. How would you use the information you have gathered for developing recruit-ing, selection, and retention strategies?
