A job description outlines what an institution requires their employees to have in terms of their core competencies, skills, relationships with others, technological prowess, and other elements before they are considered fit to work for them. The Human Resources Director is one of the most important senior employees of any firm, and this paper gives both their job description and analysis.
Job Description
A Human Resources Director is in charge of guiding and managing the entire provision of the Human Resource services, programs as well as the whole company. Specifically, the Human Resources Director is tasked with staffing and recruitment, organizational and space planning, organizational development, employee relations, policy formulation and documentation, and employee counseling and services. This senior employee also deals with the training, development, and orientation of employees, facilitation of company-wide committee, administration of compensation and benefits, the health, wellness, welfare, and safety of workers, and charitable giving.
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It is also notable that Human Resource Directors, depending on the requirements and needs of an institution, often involve in directing administration, which includes reception, and could also be involved in the facilitation of security and upkeep. It means that such professionals lead human resources practices as well as objectives that ensure the generation of a high-performance culture of the employees, which emphasizes goal attainment, standards of productivity, quality, empowerment, and recruitment to facilitate continuous creation of superior workforces. The chosen job description of the Human Resources Director is based on five fundamental objectives. The first one is ongoing employee development, the creation of company culture cultivated by the workers with respect to high performance, continuous improvement, and quality, the development of Human Resources departments, the creation of superior workforces, and the safety of employees.
Job Analysis
Q1
The job description presented above was based on work journals, which highlight the areas of concern for the Human Resources Directors. The journals used in the development of the job description highlight the fundamental objectives of the Human Resources Director, and places them answerable to the CEO of a company. For instance, while developing the job description, it was identifiable that the creation of a job description for this management position required much consideration for all the issues related to the Human Resources Department (Ulrich et al., 2005). It is found, for example, that Human Resources Departments not only deal with issues of labor relations such as the remuneration of workers, but also with the issues of communication both internally and externally. For this reason, five aspects of the position of the Human Resources Director were reported in extant literature, and they formed the basis of the job description.
The first of such aspects was the need to consider the duties as well as tasks of the Human Resources Director, which according to O*NET OnLine (n.d), defines the elementary component of a job. The Human Resources Directors are required to be aware of what they are tasked to do for their institutions for them to evaluate their competence for the job. The second aspect considered in the development of the job description was the environment; an aspect with a significant effect on the physical needs for professionals in their performance of duty (Ulrich et al., 2005). Third on the list of elements considered in the description was tools and equipment, since all tasks are required to be completed using an equipment or tool of some type. The description further considered the element of relationships at the workplace, which could be internal and external. Lastly, literature reported the need to incorporate the requirements aspect, which relates to the abilities, skills, and knowledge needed in the performance of tasks.
Q2
As explained in the preceding part, the aspects of job description were the basis of the choice of the description. However, it is notable that literature reports that some of the job descriptions could contain components that are outside the requirements of company. Therefore, the five fundamental objectives of the Human Resources Department of any company, but with a specific reference to the nature of a specific company. For example, it was needful to describe that Human Resources Directors need to develop a strong workforce, which is a vital component for productivity (Schuler and Jackson, 2010). The fact that the Human Resources department should also be concerned with the issues of safety at the workplace meant that Human Resources Directors should be aware of such a duty. Alongside these two, literature reports the need for Human Resources Directors to establish the Human Resources department whose manager will be accountable to the Human Resources Director. This connection would mean that the Human Resources Director would be a senior employee compared to the Human Resources manager, which will allow a better coordination.
The description uses the term ‘direct’ for most of the duties since the Human Resources Director will be in charge of overall coordination of events at the company. It was also necessary that the Human Resources Directors note the commitment of their organizations towards attaining the profit goals, which is common for all businesses. For such a reason, the need to develop a culture of high performance, continuous improvement, and high quality production was an necessary requirement. Lastly, the description considered the fact that employees need to develop their careers as individuals, which means that despite their commitment to the advantage of their employers, the Human Resources Director should enhance their personal development on a regular basis.
The firm should also conduct regular updates of their job description through committees on the same. It is understood that such updates will allow the company to ensure that the job description is amended to suit the requirements of the company, which changes according to circumstances of operation. Such updates could be made at the end of each trading year, a time when the company needs to re-evaluate the performance of the Human Resources department. Shorter update periods might disrupt the performance of the department while longer periods might fail to capture the changes in the needs of the company.
Q3
The use of a work journal and interviews in the process of creation of a job description would be more useful in the creation of a more thorough and complete job description. While this approach may create several duties that could not be rated to a specific company, it should be appreciated that it contains elements that could be selected to suit a specific context (Hendry, 2012). Having a rich choice of options of the duties that the Human Resources Director is required to accomplish would provide a chance to establish most other duties that would otherwise be missed out if the process involved other approaches such as interviews and questionnaires. As much as there could a variation in the needs from company to company, it is acknowledged that work journals have a rich source of information researched for specific industries. Secondly, work journals allow for a faster, yet comprehensive work description since the involved persons are only require to retrieve data that would then be put to the context of a particular firm.
The use of interviews creates a real advantage of narrowing down to the specifics of a given company (Hendry, 2012). For instance, the interviews will help the firms to determine what is best for them according to their needs and operational capacity. This approach literary implies a translation of research work into practice, which also helps the firms to determine other issues that could not be included in the literature from work journals such as determining the most appropriate period for review of the job descriptions. Therefore, the combination of work journals and interviews would make the job description more comprehensive and complete for two reasons. First, it would have been created from more information than if another source were used. Second, the job description would have been made to suit the needs of a given company while allowing them to add components that would have otherwise been forgot out of a lack of speculation about their importance.
Q4
Literature reports that there are both internal and external sources of recruitment for the post of Human Resources Director. For instance, advertisements would be one of the most suitable sources of external recruitment for this post since it is most used by more skilled laborers (Barber, 2008). The post of Human Resources Director requires much skill, which could easily be found if the firm advertises the vacancy to the public. In addition, the use of advertising media such as social media, professional journals, newspapers, television, and others could allow the firm to reach as many people as possible within as short time as it could be possible, hence reducing the time that the company would wait to find the best candidates (Barber, 2008). The company could also use direct recruitment from some institutions of learning such as universities, colleges, and schools of management as an external source of recruitment (Barber, 2008). It should be understood that contemporary companies are now striking partnerships with institutions of higher learning in an attempt to ensure that they have a continuous access to professionals who join the workforce. The firm may still use employment exchanges, which allows an existing staff to learn from the Human Resources Director and build their own capacity to take over at a given time.
In relation to the internal sources of recruitment, the company may use promotions of current employees into the position of the Human Resources Director (Barber, 2008). This approach is advantageous since it creates a feeling of commitment and hard work since employees would consider that they would be rewarded with a promotion. However, using factory gates as a course of recruitment is not a suitable method for this post for two reasons. Firstly, waiting for workers to present themselves at the factory gate might take too long to find a suitable candidate. Secondly, this source might deny the company a chance of finding the most skilled workers, which could prove detrimental to the performance of the company in future.
Q5
Several recruitment resources would be used to find the best candidate for this position. For instance, the company might want to use the resumes of the candidates, which is one of the most common resources used in recruitment (Arthur, 2012). The resume will give an implication on the professional accomplishments of the candidates as well as their work experience, which will be a vital starting point for the recruitment process. The second resource would be the criminal records of the candidates since companies will always want to hire law abiding employees because they want to stay away from legal scrutiny. Such documents as certificates indicating crime-free records of the candidates could be vital in determining who makes to the next step. Lastly, the company might want to use cross-referencing to obtain information about the candidates, especially if they have been referred by their former employers.
The conduction of tests is one of the most common tools of recruitment, and it measures the skill suitability of the candidates for the job positions they apply for (Arthur, 2012). Such tests could also be done to determine the health status of the individuals, since health is one of the critical factors determining the productivity of workers. Other tools that the company could use include interviewing the candidates and behavioral simulations. Such methods are legal and help the company to find the best candidates in aspects of skill, professionalism, and behavioral abilities. However, the company should not use HIV test results as a recruitment tool since it is unlawful.
Q6
The job description and analysis contained in this paper could also be useful in the determination of what sections need to be incorporated into the Human Resources department. While most companies have such departments, it is notable that some of them might be lacking one or two important units, which a job analysis could help identify (Barber, 2008). Secondly, such analyses and descriptions could be used in assessing the performance of the Human Resources department of a company. The logic behind this statement is the fact that a clearly defined job description could be useful in determining what each of the employees within the department is tasked with doing. A failure in the execution of a task assigned to an individual might mean general incompetence and vice versa.
References
Arthur, D. (2012). Recruiting, interviewing, selecting & orienting new employees . AMACOM Div American Mgmt Assn.
Barber, A. E. (2008). Recruiting employees: Individual and organizational perspectives (Vol. 8). Sage Publications.
Hendry, C. (2012). Human resource management . Routledge.
O*NET OnLine. (n.d.). Human resource director job description. Retrieved July 24, 2017 from http://www.onetonline.org/
Schuler, R. S., & Jackson, S. E. (2010). Linking competitive strategies with human resource management practices. The Academy of Management Executive (1987-1989) , 207-219.
Ulrich, D., Brockbank, W., Yeung, A. K., & Lake, D. G. (2005). Human resource competencies: An empirical assessment. Human Resource Management , 34 (4), 473-495.
