Just because you have a first paragraph that describes your place among the Fortune 500, doesn't necessarily mean that you have a great job posting.

Here's a juicy tidbit from WorkForce Week:

How Do We Link Job Descriptions With Our Business Strategy?

What best practices could we follow when developing and linking job descriptions to our organizational strategy?

—Making HR Count, finance/insurance/real estate, Harleysville, Pennsylvania


ANSWER
Given the turbulent market conditions facing modern companies, including frequent reorganizations and changes in business strategy, preparing job descriptions that withstand the test of time is especially challenging. Nevertheless, the steps below offer some practical approaches that should help you.

1. Be clear about the purpose your job descriptions will serve. For example: When preparing job descriptions for purposes of compensation, companies tend to use phrases that convey "compensable factors" that enable categories of responsibilities to be compared and contrasted across different jobs. But these factors may not align well with the content of your business strategy. Job descriptions aimed at selection or performance management, on the other hand, tend to align more closely with strategic objectives but must be frequently revised lest they become outdated.

2. Verify that a logical linkage exists between each job accountability and your business goals and strategies.

3. Make sure you pay adequate attention to defining logically linked competencies and skills related to each job.

4. Anticipate a short life expectancy for job descriptions. Given the rapid rate of change of high-tech companies, for example, job descriptions for research, engineering and information technology will need to be revised far more frequently than those for finance, legal or human resources.

5. Recognize that performance management is a natural complement to job descriptions. When effective, performance management emphasizes short-term outcomes (about one year) that are within the "line of sight" of your organization's more long-range goals.

In fast-moving professional services and high-tech firms, traditional job descriptions are practically obsolete. Instead, these companies rely on individual performance plans to define work objectives, performance standards, competencies and needed areas of development. The goal is the same: to motivate employees in ways that sustain their organizations' performance.

A SWOT analysis (analysis of an internal environment’s strengths and weaknesses, and an external environment’s opportunities and threats) of jobs starts with examining the linkage between the jobs and these two environments, and what your department must deliver as results.

For example, if your department is required to deliver high-quality repetitive tasks, this would require competencies related to attention to detail and motivation by performance of small tasks. On the other hand, if your department is responsible for designing a major component of the engine for the space shuttle, this would require competencies related to analysis and innovation.

By first linking the departmental results to job competencies, you can then analyze the job descriptions to determine if they contain competencies that support departmental outcomes, or if there are competencies missing that are critical to delivering results.

Opportunities and threats can be viewed in several ways. One way is to think of opportunities as ways you can use skilled people from other departments, or job families in the same department, to bolster a lack of competence in a specific job. The same may be true in looking at threats, in that even though people in the department have the requisite competence, they could be overburdened with work, or they could be asked by other departments to fill in at critical times and not be available when needed.

Another way of looking at opportunities and threats is in relation to experiences needed to develop competence. You may have enough people today that are competent, but if there are not development opportunities for junior people, a threat to the department may be a lack of skilled workers in the future. An opportunity would be the ability to give people cross-training by assigning them to projects with those who possess those competencies.