Job Analysis
Job Analysis
What is job analysis?
- Systematically identify a job's tasks, responsibilities, and required competencies
- The outputs are the job description and the job specification
- The foundation of every HR system, including hiring, evaluation, training, and compensation
What job analysis really changes is the reference point for HR decisions. Before analysis, “what Manager Kim has been doing” was the job. After analysis, the benchmark is a task list that stays in place even when the person changes. A job posting that vaguely asked for “3 years of similar experience” becomes a line with a verb, such as “conduct supplier unit-price renegotiation.” And in performance reviews, you can now explain what the B rating was based on. Think of it as putting the work itself, not the person, down in a document.
There are two main approaches. The task-based approach (DACUM, functional job analysis) breaks down "what the person does" into verb-level tasks, typically producing a list of 40 to 60 tasks. The competency-based approach uncovers "why that person performs so well" through behavioral event interviews with top performers. When designing a training system, combining both is the safer choice. Boundaries matter too: job analysis and job evaluation are different tasks. The first investigates what the work involves; the second ranks the relative value of that work to set grades and pay bands. Adopting job-based pay means analysis comes first, then evaluation.
Operating conditions are worth knowing too. A DACUM workshop typically brings together 8–12 top performers from the business over two days (12–14 hours of actual work). Drop below 5 participants and one person’s work habits harden into the standard. A job description is not a finished product but a document that gets revised, and it needs updating whenever there is a reorganization or a system replacement. Unless you name who owns the semiannual revision in advance, most job descriptions drift away from actual work within two years.
The most common slip in practice is simply writing down "what people do now." If you only survey all current employees, the average performer's work becomes the standard, and the training built from it just maintains the current level. This is also how training budget ends up attached to tasks that automation will eliminate within three years. Another failure is treating documentation as the goal itself. If a company pays consulting fees for 80 job descriptions and never links them to hiring, evaluation, or training, those documents come out only in later labor disputes over the scope of work. Before starting the analysis, decide which HR systems the results will plug into.
Kyungtae KimHR expert · Organizational culture and HR strategy consultant
John KimAuthor of B2B Marketing Design and CEO of Nanum ConsultingIt began with Taylor’s scientific management in the early 20th century and developed into standard methodologies (DACUM, functional job analysis, and others) in industrial-organizational psychology.
Let’s look at a hypothetical case. Company A, a medical device distributor, has 240 employees, annual revenue of about KRW 90 (≈ US$1) billion, and 68 sales staff. A new sales hire took an average of 5.8 months to close a first deal, and 7 people left within a year of joining last year alone. The head of sales asked the HRD team to “extend new-hire training to 3 months.”
- Instead of simply extending the timeline, the HRD lead told the division head, "We don't have a list of exactly what new hires can't do right now," and secured budget for a 2-day DACUM workshop first.
- We gathered 9 of the top 20% of sales reps for two days and broke down their daily work on sticky notes. The result was 47 tasks, and 11 of them were not in the existing new-hire training at all.
- On the “hospital purchasing team unit-price renegotiation” item, Manager Park, an 8-year veteran, drew a line: “Hand this to a 6-month hire and we lose the supplier.” So each task was tagged with its own range of years of experience needed to perform it.
- We sent a validation survey to all 68 sales staff, asking them to rate each task’s importance, difficulty, and frequency on a 5-point scale. With a 91% response rate, we narrowed the 47 tasks to 34 core tasks.
- Rather than leaving the finished job descriptions on a shelf, the team carried them into three places: the qualification wording in job postings, the 3-month onboarding checklist for new hires, and the semiannual review form. Responsibility for revisions was assigned to the Sales Planning team.
- A year later, the time from a new hire's start to their first closed deal fell from 5.8 months to 3.4 months, and first-year departures dropped from 7 to 2.