Over the last few months, my children and I have been playing Minecraft together and it has been a lot of fun building houses, fighting off zombies, and mining for resources. A player usually progresses from using wooden tools and leather armor to the more advanced diamond tools and armor. However, diamonds are rare and usually found only through diligent mining efforts.
Job design also requires diligent effort. Job design is the process by which you identify what roles and responsibilities a job will have. It is part of the initial recruiting process and requires some digging/mining to uncover what you are looking for. A few of the questions that need to be answered during this design process are:
- What is the job you think you need to hire for?
- What is driving that need?
- What happens if you don’t hire someone for that job?
- What is the core skill set of the job? What about the preferred skills?
That said, job design does not have to take a long time to do.
What does take time is the actual recruiting. It’s the reviewing of applications and resumes, scheduling interviews, conducting interviews, negotiating, etc. And all of that is after you have developed the job description, the recruiting stages, and the interview questions per stage.
A few years ago, Harvard Business Review had a spotlight series on “The Trouble with CMO’s” (LINK) that went into great depth about why chief marketing officers did not last long at organizations. It had to deal with poor job design. What a firm thought they needed was one type of a CMO when in fact, they actually needed another type.
It can be very tempting to rush through the job design process or even skip it. Don’t. As Stephen Covey puts it, “If the ladder is not leaning against the right wall, every step we take just gets us to the wrong place faster.” By being diligent with your job design process, you will most likely increase your chances of finding the talent you are looking for.
Happy mining.
