The Big Book of HR, Revised and Updated Edition

5

Job Descriptions

This isn’t nearly as dull and dry as it sounds. There are lots of good reasons why organizations invest the time to research and write job descriptions. An executive who recently completed a year-long process to finalize job descriptions for the more than 100 employees in a large medical practice is now seeing the value of job descriptions. She said, “Now we have a basis for our performance review process and a valuable tool that will help new hires become productive quicker. It took us a while to do it but it was worth the effort!”

Job descriptions start with a job analysis, which is a systematic study of positions in order to evaluate what activities a position should contain and how each position in the organization relates ...