How Position Management Simplifies Your Life

Do you follow position management best practices in your organization? Do you use your HR software’s full capabilities to increase efficiency? Creating positions, inserting them into the organization’s hierarchy, assigning job descriptions, salaries, and requirements for those positions, hiring the right people to fill them—all of these tasks flow out of position management. If you get it right, you add tremendous value to the organization. If you don’t, you could sabotage productivity with reporting problems, inefficient recruiting processes, and increased data maintenance needs. 

• Job – A job is a collection of related tasks and responsibilities that are grouped together for the purpose of accomplishing work within an organization. A job has specific characteristics. For example, a person must possess certain skills, education and occupational experience to qualify for that job. It has a job grade (for compensation purposes), a targeted salary, and a compensation market value. It requires certain competencies that may be used for career/succession planning or individual performance management. Example: Your organization may include the jobs CEO, HR Administrator, or Accounts Payable Clerk III.
• Position – A position is a specific occurrence of a job within an organization, or one “chair.” The position is linked to the job and inherits all of the characteristics of a job. For example, the position of HR Administrator will have all of the same characteristics of the HR Administrator job – the same grade, job description, salary, etc. In some cases, there is only one position attached to a job. You could have the CEO job and attached to it, a CEO position. In other cases you might have one job and many positions. For example, you might have one Accounts Payable Clerk III job, and 30 positions that fulfill the role of an Accounts Payable Clerk III. One position = one employee, but one job (may) = many employees.

• Simplify data entry—You don’t have to re-enter job and position specifics every time you hire a new employee. Simply plug his or her name and employee information into the position and you’re off and running.
• Improve data integrity—Because positions remain in place even when vacant, you have fewer data entry errors.
• Generate job postings—When you’re ready to hire, your HRMS can generate job postings using the descriptions and qualifications attached to the position. Some systems also provide search functions and reporting based on open positions, allowing you to match your needs with candidate applications.
• Streamline HR functions with reports—Create reports for open positions, approvals, job requirements, and candidate skills matching based on the data you’ve already entered.
• Maintain hierarchical structure—Define hierarchical relationships based on positions, not individuals. If the VP of Finance must approve budget proposals, for example, department heads will report to that person. But suppose the VP of Finance role is currently vacant? With position management, the organizational structure remains the same—employees still report to that position—and whoever manages that position during the interim will simply take over the responsibilities. Once you fill the position, you won’t need to restructure, because you never changed the hierarchy in the first place.
• Security administration – Because employee records link to their reporting supervisors in the organization hierarchy, your HRMS will know which managers can access information about which employees. You can use this capability for goal setting, approvals, training checklists, and any other tasks that require management approval.

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