Job analysis was one of the first topics I learned about while studying to be an industrial/organizational psychologist. Job analysis is a best practice and foundational to recruitment, selection, learning and development, compensation, and performance management. The purpose of job analysis is to study and better understand the underlying knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics (KSAOs) required to be successful in a role. The collection and analysis of this robust job information grounds all HR practices. A job analysis can be conducted in a variety of ways. Some examples include job observation, focus groups, interviews, and questionnaires.

As a talent assessment consultant at Capital One, I work with talent acquisition and HR business partners every day to develop selection strategies to hire top talent. In this digital age, roles are constantly changing and new roles are being created. As such, it is critical to have a scalable and sustainable process of collecting the job analysis information needed to develop fair, reliable, valid, and defensible selection tools.

If you are looking to hire top talent in the finance industry, it is critical to start with job analysis. With this information, you can create robust job descriptions that are accurate and clearly describe the necessary work experiences, required and preferred education level, and key duties and responsibilities of the role. Having this information in a job description will lead to more qualified candidate pools and perhaps make a recruiter’s job a bit easier.

Once you identify the KSAOs for your finance role, you can begin to explore selection devices that assess them. For example, through your job analysis you may find that planning and organizing is critical for success in your finance role. Based on this information, you can develop behavioral interview questions (“Tell me about a time when . . . ”) to assess that skill. Or you may discover that reasoning and critical thinking skills are important for success in the finance role; therefore, you may consider implementing a cognitive ability test into your selection process.

Another important reason to conduct a job analysis is legal defensibility of selection devices. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) uses the Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures, or the “Guidelines,” to help determine whether an employer is illegally discriminating. The Guidelines state that the choice of a selection procedure should be based on an understanding of the job (through job analysis).

The Guidelines apply to all selection procedures used to make employment decisions, including interviews, review of experience or education from application, and so on. According to the Guidelines, “A selection process which has an adverse impact on the employment opportunities of members of a race, color, religion, sex, or national origin group and thus disproportionately screens them out is unlawfully discriminatory unless the process or its component procedures have been validated in accord with the Guidelines, or the user otherwise justifies them in accord with Federal law.” So what is that validation?

Employers typically want to know whether candidates will be successful if they are hired. Validation is the process of gathering data to determine the usefulness of a selection tool in making hiring decisions. More specifically, validation is the demonstration of the job relatedness of a selection procedure. To understand the job relatedness of your selection device, you must have documented job analysis findings. There are different “types,” or strategies, of validity that the Guidelines recognize:

· Criterion-related validity—a statistical demonstration of a relationship between scores on a selection procedure and job performance of a sample of workers.

· Content validity—a demonstration that the content of a selection procedure is representative of important aspects of performance on the job.

· Construct validity—a demonstration that a selection procedure measures a construct (something believed to be an underlying human trait or characteristic, such as honesty) and that the construct is important for successful job performance.

Hopefully by now you understand how important it is to have documented job analysis information for each of the roles in your organization. When in doubt, start with job analysis!