Job Analysis
| Date | 01 October 1970 |
| Published date | 01 October 1970 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0032258X7004301009 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
C. C.
LEEK,
B.A.
Department
of
Industrial Administration, The University
of
Aston
in Birmingham.
Mr. Leek's experience in teaching in police management courses
has been
of
special advantage in the following treatment
of
an im-
portant aspect
of
the management
of
human resources. Our scarcest
commodity is manpower and the article discusses ways
of
applying it
to the best advantage. Industry's latest management techniques and
control systems are drawn upon.
JOB
ANALYSIS
Managers and management thinkers have long been agreed that
Industry is very much concerned with the maximisation of profits,
community service, and so on. Unfortunately, for many people,
financial sophistication is not all that is required. In order to achieve
an overall financial objective, the management of an organisation
must effectively utilise all its resources. With increased technological
and financial competence, management today has got
to
face up to
the task of dealing with that most infinite of variables, its man-
power. One of the management's most pressing problems is the
forecasting of its labour requirements and ensuring that manpower
of the necessary calibre is available as and when required. Conse-
quently, when we are engaged in staffing an organisation, it is im-
portant for us to define effectively both the quantity and the quality
of personnel required.
It
is
not
my intention in this paper to discuss in detail the prob-
lems of long and short term manpower and organisational planning.
Neither is it my purpose to deal in detail with the skills and tech-
niques of interviewing and assessment. I am rather more concerned
with isolating one of the keys to the entire staffing process, the skills
of Job Analysis.
If
we assume that the organisation has already got a pretty good
idea of its basic numerical manpower requirements over a given
period of time, and that it is also committed to a system of candidate
assessment, then the next thing it has to do is to decide what is the
"right
job"
it is supposed to be selecting the "right
man"
for. In
other words,
whatwe
need is a means of saying, "Look, this is the
job, these are its demands, now we can go on to see how the candi-
dates measure up to them". One of the gravest mistakes a manager
can make is to introduce sophisticated interviewing techniques,
testing procedures and candidate assessment schemes, but to fail to
provide himself with the hardware for actually taking the selection
decision. Even if we have got an objective system of candidate
assessment, how can we seriously think that we can make the right
October 1970
301
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