How to Improve Hiring & Retention with Better Job Descriptions

CompAnalyst is a comprehensive compensation management solution and software that provides your organization with 100% employer-reported surveys, market pay data, and job content. In this webinar, Ken Clemens, a Solution Consultant at Salary.com, will walk you through one of the many components of JobArchitect. Job description management is the focus of JobArchitect and we will provide an overview of how you can use it effectively and successfully.

Why Job Descriptions Matter

Job descriptions are an essential part of the job application. Job seekers will use it to determine whether the role is in line with their skills and experience and if it is something they would like to do. As this is the case, your job descriptions must be accurate and closely match the needs of the position itself. Ken Clemens offers his view:

“Making sure that you have really strong definition and documentation around your jobs is essential to hiring the right people. It’s also extremely important for retention.”

It is very difficult for employers to pay correctly for a job if you don’t have a comprehensive understanding of what the job entails. Using JobArchitect can give you the resources to accurately define the roles within your organization. It is still important to be aware of the job description challenges that exist, however. These challenges include:

• Knowing what to include
• Maintaining consistency
• Writing (or finding) quality content
• Gathering feedback from all stakeholders
• Keeping them current
• Version control

An Overview of JobArchitect

Now that you are aware of why job descriptions matter and the challenges that come with making them, you can begin to get to grips with JobArchitect. JobArchitect seamlessly integrates with the CompAnalyst software as it aims to give you the opportunity to have full and flexible control over your compensation management. Here is a starting guide on how you can use CompAnalyst.

You can see the JobArchitect landing screen above. Here you can see all the job titles and job codes within your organization. What is reflected on this screen will depend on how your organization is structured.

When you select a job title on this screen, you will have the ability to look at its history. This means you can see the current and previous job descriptions of the role. You can also see who made what changes and when they did it through the side-by-side comparisons that we offer.

This landing page also gives you the ability to export data into friendly formats such as pdf and word documents. You can choose whether you would rather export what you find as a job description or job posting. You can customize and build these out with your own designs, templates, and layouts depending on what your needs are. Ken Clemens summarizes:

“Those are just some of the high-level capabilities when it comes to viewing your library of job descriptions. When it comes time to write these descriptions and collaborate on them, that’s really where JobArchitect starts to shine.”

Above is the skeleton that JobArchitect provides for you to build your job descriptions. You can decide to put new information into the fields provided or if you would rather reuse an older template. The fields provided ensure that you can capture the information that you need to implement in your job descriptions.

Drop-down menus and pre-selected fields are also provided for some areas. This helps to put up some guard rails when interacting with people and keep consistency. Below you can see how we will also provide you with sample language from a variety of places.

You can cross reference your existing descriptions to see if any descriptions from similar job families can help you. If one example catches your eye, you can drag and drop responsibilities that may be useful to your job description. There are roughly 5,000 generic job profiles in the tool that are updated on a monthly basis for you to use.

The tool also provides you with the chance to cross reference job descriptions by searching different postings that are on the internet. You can filter these using keywords, company names, and location. Doing this allows you to effectively find job descriptions that are relevant and of value to you.

Other features of JobArchitect include the ability to spellcheck and bias-check your job descriptions to be more inclusive. You can also send your job descriptions to other users both internal and external to the software for reviewing purposes. The last benefit we will touch on is the ability to set up alerts to remind you to update specific job descriptions after a certain amount of time.

Watch the Webinar to Find Out More

For more details, watch the webinar to find out how you can use JobArchitect and CompAnalyst to the maximum. Kem Clemens will walk you through what you can do and how to do it. So, what are you waiting for? Watch the full webinar here.