Job Evaluation at Blazers
I recently interviewed Jane Woo, the human resources manager at Blazers, a firm that deals in beauty and cosmetic products in Canberra. She informed me that as a human resource practitioner, she is involved in job evaluation.
According to her, job evaluation is the process of gathering and organizing and describing information about specific tasks, responsibilities, and duties of employees to determine the compensation that is commensurate with employees’ duties and responsibilities or when particular, training is to be recommended for staff. In other words, it is the process through which the importance or value of a certain job about the rest is determined to arrive at the appropriate remuneration for each job or simply rank jobs for internal analysis.
She informed me that her department uses the Mercer Cullen Egan Dell (CED) job evaluation system, which entails evaluating a job based on eight criteria conceptualized under three factors: judgment, accountability, and expertise, that give each job its value.
The judgment factor seeks to evaluate judgment challenges of the position and is made up of two components: job environment and reasoning. In the job environment, she informed me that they seek to determine the tasks and activities required for the position as well as the possibilities of position holders to come up with new techniques to accomplish tasks. Evaluation in terms of reasoning, on the other hand, examines the requirement of a job holder to solve problems and exercise judgment for simple and complex tasks.
The second factor that is evaluated is accountability, which is concerned with the kind of authority the position attracts and the level of the holder’s involvement in the allocation of resources in the organization. She said that the components for this factor are influence, impact, and involvement. According to her, influence particularly centers on the level of influence the position has on service delivery and the production process.
She noted that top management has a higher level of influence than middle management. The involvement component examines the scope of access to available resources. Some position holders share resources, while others have total access to the same. The third component of this factor impacts. It focuses on the number of monetary resources that the position holder is accountable for.
She then mentioned the third factor: expertise, which they break down to interpersonal skills, knowledge, and breadth. The interpersonal skills component focuses on the extent to which the position requires its holder to employ people skills such as communication, negotiation, and persuasion to diffuse tension and get the job done.
For breadth, an analysis of the diversity of tasks and activities required for a position is made, the higher the position, the wider the breadth. Concerning knowledge, an examination of educational skills and training requirements for a position is made. It allows matching skill requirements with available expertise.
She informed me, that once a score is attached to each factor about the job at hand, total scores for all factors are collated after which the score for each job is generated thus giving value for each job. She stressed that at Blazers, the exercise is carried out by a panel of specialists from her human resource department to avoid possibilities of bias. She, however, stressed that, however, scientific the system may seem, it still relies on the human judgment, which is why they desist from evaluating an individual and restrict themselves to a position. Lastly, she informed that human resource personnel charged with such responsibility must familiarize themselves fully, with specific jobs they seek to evaluate before embarking on the process.