The Manager's Guide to HR

Max Muller

• Verlag: AMACOM
• Jahr: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780814433034
• Auflage: 2
• Thema: Commerce
• Thema: Gestion des ressources humaines

Managing people is a tricky business—and managers and small business owners need a clear understanding of the essentials of human resources to survive.

The original edition of The Manager's Guide to HR gives you an introduction to the regulations, rights, and responsibilities related to hiring and firing, benefits, compensation, documentation, performance evaluations, training, and more. However, much has changed since then.

Extensively revised, this second edition covers all the key areas of the original edition and brings you up to speed on current developments in employment law, including:

• How social media is changing the recruitment landscape
• Shifting labor standards regarding compensation and benefits
• The National Labor Relations Board's stance on work-related employee speech on social media
• The Employee Retirement Income Security Act
• New record-keeping requirements
• Amendments to the Family and Medical Leave Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act

Featuring step-by-step guidance on everything from COBRA compliance to privacy issues, The Manager's Guide to HR is now once again the most up-to-date, invaluable resource any manager of personnel could have.

CHAPTER 1

HIRING

INTRODUCTION

Hiring dumb is easy. Hiring smart is hard.

All it takes to hire dumb is to select a job description written by someone once upon a time, a long time ago—one that is hopelessly out of date when compared with the job as it currently exists—and then use that job definition to recruit a candidate who fits the description, not the actual job.

Hiring dumb also involves advertising job openings in ways that discriminate against potential candidates based on their race, religion, age, sex, national origin, physical disabilities, or other legally protected characteristics.

Hiring smart involves defining the job properly and then developing a job description that is more than a bullet list of generalized descriptors of technical skills.

A well-researched and well-developed job description is the foundation stone of smart recruiting, interviewing, and hiring, as well as staff retention.

DEFINING THE JOB

The first order of business in hiring smart is to analyze the job in terms of:

• Skills and knowledge required

• How the work is performed

• Typical work settings

Analytic Steps

Identify and determine in detail the particular job duties and requirements for a given job, and the relative importance of these duties and requirements, by undertaking the following steps:

1. Review existing job description, if any.

2. Review public source information and job classification systems.

3. Conduct incumbent surveys and interviews.

4. Conduct supervisor surveys and interviews.

Review Existing Job Description Although your existing job description could well be out of date, it does represent a starting point from which to derive basic technical skills, reporting relationships, and other information.

The existing description also provides you with a baseline against which to measure the current job—in other words, how the job has evolved or materially changed.

Review Public Source Information and Job Classification Systems Looking at how other companies describe jobs can help you write a good job description. Here are some examples of public sources of that information:

The Occupational Information Network (O*NET) System
(www.onetcenter.org)

• Database of occupational requirements and worker attributes

• Comprehensive source of descriptors, with ratings of importance, level, relevance, or extent, for more than nine hundred occupations

• Common language and terminology describing occupational requirements

The Occupational Outlook Handbook (OOH)
(www.bls.gov/oco/home.htm)

• Publication of the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics

• Includes information about the nature of the work, working conditions, training and education, earnings, and job outlook for hundreds of different occupations

• Released biennially with its companion publication, the Career Guide to Industries
These sources can give you a good idea of how to classify a job.

Conduct Incumbent Surveys and Interviews Find out what the people who have actually been doing the job think about it. What technical skills do they think are required, to whom do they believe they report (irrespective of what an organization chart says), who do they believe reports to them, whom do they interact with on an ongoing basis, how do they believe the job is actually performed, what percentage of their time is being spent on various tasks or undertakings, and so forth?

Help them help you. Most staff members do not think of their jobs in an organized fashion or spend any time trying to measure how many minutes or hours per day they engage in any particular task as opposed to any other. However, that is precisely the information you need to successfully analyze the job and develop a meaningful job description. Consequently, provide incumbents with box checklists, surveys, and questionnaires to fill out.

Box Checklists Here is an example of a portion of a box checklist related to bookkeeping, accounting, or auditing clerks.

Surveys and Questionnaires Here is an example of a portion of a survey related to bookkeeping, accounting, or auditing clerks.

Please specify the tools and equipment you use in your job:

_____ Desktop computers

_____ Scanners

_____ Other:___________________

_____ Other:___________________

Please specify the technology you use in your job:

Accounting software

_____ FlexiLedger software

_____ Intuit QuickBooks

_____ Intuit Quicken software

_____ Quicken Elite software

_____ Other:____________________

_____ Other:____________________

Compliance software

_____ CRSTL Compliance Positioning System

_____ FLS eDP.Payrolltax

_____ Intrax ProcedureNet

_____ Paisley Cardmap

_____ Other:____________________

_____ Other:____________________

Document management software

_____ Accutrac software

_____ OmniRIM software

_____ Records management software

_____ Other:_____________________

_____ Other:_____________________

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) software

_____ AcornSystems Corporate Performance Management

_____ AMS Services AMS Sagitta

_____ Business performance management (BPM) software

_____ Cartesis ES Magnitude

_____ Other:____________________

_____ Other:____________________

Financial analysis software

_____ Auditing software

_____ AuditWare software

_____ MethodWare ProAudit Advisor

_____ RSM McGladrey Auditor Assistant

_____ Other:____________________

_____ Other:____________________

Please explain the following relationships as they are related to your job:

• Supervision given and received

• Relationships with internal people

• Relationships with external people

People who have had the job before are probably your best source of information about the job’s day-to-day responsibilities, so make sure you ask them. You also, however, need to check with their managers, because the job may be changing or the manager may not have liked the way the employee handled the position.

Conduct Supervisor Surveys and Interviews Surveying and interviewing supervisors can provide you with the information you need to determine the core competencies required for the specific job in question. For example, you should discuss the following:

KNOWLEDGE
Clerical	Knowledge of administrative and clerical procedures and systems such as word processing, managing files and records, stenography and transcription, designing forms, and other office procedures and terminology.
Mathematics	Knowledge of arithmetic, algebra, geometry, calculus, statistics, and their applications.
English Language	Knowledge of the structure and content of the English language including the meaning and spelling of words, rules of composition, and grammar.
Economics and Accounting	Knowledge of economic and accounting principles and practices, financial markets, banking, and analysis and reporting of financial data.
Customer and Personal Service	Knowledge of principles and processes for providing customer and personal services. This includes customer needs assessment, meeting quality standards for services, and evaluation of customer satisfaction.
Computers and Electronics	Knowledge of circuit boards, processors, chips, electronic equipment, and computer hardware and software, including applications and programming.
SKILLS
Mathematics	Using mathematics to solve problems.
Reading Comprehension	Understanding written sentences and paragraphs in work-related document...