According to DIN 33430, a well-founded requirement analysis forms the basis of successful and professional personnel selection. As part of this, criteria for professional success are defined on the basis of which a job profile is created. The job profile, also known as the qualification profile, is a systematic, usually tabular list of all qualifications and competencies required for the advertised position.
It answers a central question: What does an ideal applicant need to bring with them in order to be successful in the position to be filled? This makes job profiles one of the most important tools in personnel selection.
Because one thing is clear: HR managers can only assess the suitability of the candidates for advertised positions if they know the specific requirements of a position.
Definition: Job profile
A job profile is a systematic listing of all competencies that applicants need to bring with them in order to be successful in a position.
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1. What belongs in a job profile?
A job profile contains all disciplinary and interdisciplinary requirement groups (also known as qualification groups and characteristic groups) that are required of applicants. HR managers usually differentiate between four categories:
- Formal requirements (e.g. training, professional experience)
- Technical requirements (e.g. programming skills, Excel knowledge)
- Methodical skills (e.g. analytical thinking, negotiating skills)
- Social / personal skills (e.g. ability to work in a team, empathy)
Depending on the tasks of the workplace, additional requirement groups can also be included. Examples are physical and mental requirements.
2. How to create a job profile?
Step 1: Requirement analysis
The first step in creating a job profile should always be a well-founded requirement analysis. Two methods are primarily used in practice:
Experience-based, intuitive methods
Experience-based, intuitive methods rely on, as the name suggests, experience-based or intuitive-based judgments by experts. Most of these are experienced HR managers or managers from the specialist area. Often it can also make sense to include predecessors. The requirement profile represents a compilation of all competencies and characteristics that the experts consider necessary for success in the position.
Person-related empirical methods
Person-related empirical methods use statistical connections between the characteristics of professionals and their job performance to derive requirement profile.
For example, if one observes that sales employees with a high degree of empathy are particularly likely to achieve their sales goals, empathy would be included in the job profile.
The goal here is to ensure that the profile always contains precisely those requirements that best predict professional success.
The methods in comparison
While the advantage of experience-based methods lies in the simplicity of implementation, empirical methods have the advantage that they largely exclude bias due to subjective perceptions of professionals and can usually adapt more quickly to changes in the world of work.
For example: Executives and HR managers tend to name competencies that they believe they have themselves, and often perceive changes in the required competencies over time only belatedly.
Step 2: Requirement analysis
Once the requirements have been analyzed and identified, the second step is to use the information to determine the most specific requirements for applicants. We have summarized 5 secrets to success for you, with the help of which you can increase the quality of your job profile in the long term.
A good job profile is:
1. Clear and selective
- Formulate job profiles precisely, clearly and avoid empty phrases.
- Formulate requirements as concretely as possible (e.g., ability to listen empathically) and avoid superordinate competence terms (e.g., social competence).
2. Consensus-based and empirically sound
- Integrate multiple perspectives (e.g., cross-departmental exchange)
- Favor empirical over experiential-intuitive methods and integrate statistical data on the career success of previous applicants.
3. Up-to-date and future-oriented
- Understand job profiles as a continuous improvement process (CIP).
- Review and adapt regularly to developments in the job and the job environment
- Integrate potential-related skills (e.g., ability to change) to meet the challenges of a fast-paced work environment
4. Allows for weightings
- Weight criteria according to their importance and differentiate between must, should and can criteria
- List the requirements in order of importance
- Check whether must-have criteria are actually essential for success in a position
5. Fair and non-discriminatory
- • Avoid discrimination of groups based on e.g. gender or culture.
- Include requirements (e.g., physical characteristics) that can potentially disadvantage groups only if they are essential to the position (must-have criteria)
- Use inclusive language that speaks equally to individuals of all genders and cultures
3. Use the job profile correctly in your personnel selection process!
The job profile is ready - what happens now? Now it's getting really exciting! Because the job profile has two central, key roles in the personnel selection process.
Recruitment
The job profile is a central element of job advertisements and thus plays an important role in attracting future talents. This is because the requirements specified therein influence a) who classifies the position as attractive and b) who feels suitable for it. The requirement profile that you specify thus influences the talents that you attract and find.
Personnel selection
The job profile also plays a central role in the aptitude-diagnostic selection process On the one hand, it determines which competencies are measured in the personnel selection process, and on the other hand, it enables a structured assessment of the suitability of applicants for the position. The criteria defined in the job profile are used to create a target profile against which the actual competencies of applicants can be compared (target-actual comparison). This enables HR managers to identify the areas in which applicants exceed or fall short of the requirements.
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