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Why Role Analysis Is Your Secret Weapon Against Mis-hires

When an employee leaves due to job dissatisfaction or fails to perform up to expectations, it certainly affects the bottom line as well as overall morale and productivity.

Mis-hires can create friction among employees, weaken faith in leadership, and prevent teams from meeting their goals.

When employees don’t clearly understand their role, responsibilities, and expectations, productivity drops and they naturally disengage from their work.  

The root cause?

A failure to properly align roles with the organization’s purpose, mission, and strategic priorities. When an organization focuses on Strategic People Operations and works to optimize their people talent, contributions are elevated and optimized, making it easier to achieve results.

Watch the Video on Strategic People Operations

How Roles Become Misaligned

Roles are typically created in a reactionary state under time constraints. You identify responsibilities that need to be filled, and you list the capabilities needed to perform them successfully. You create a job description, put out the word that you’re hiring, and hope for the best.

But a crucial step has been missed. In the rush to hire, it’s easy to skip the process of Role Analysis.

As a result, leaders, colleagues, and the employee in question all struggle to define, understand, and focus on clear responsibilities. This leads to conflict between employees and their managers,  frustrating performance reviews, and time not spent on tasks that move the business forward.

Why Role Analysis is the Solution

Role Analysis, a cornerstone of strategic people operations, is the key to preventing a costly hit to your bottom line, loss in productivity as well as the frustrations associated with course-correcting after a mis-hire.

It’s the process of translating your high-level values into practical, day-to-day actions. By establishing key performance indicators, core functions, competencies, and behaviors, you define clear expectations for all parties and set employees up to thrive.

No organization, leader, or employee is immune to mistakes or failures.

Role Analysis provides the framework to address issues before they become major conflicts. It gives the employee a guide through which they can understand what they’re accountable for, and how to behave moving forward. It gives leaders the tools to, hire, assess, develop, and coach their teams.

Start Before the Interview Process  

To truly embed organizational purpose, mission, and values into each role, the position needs to be defined with clarity from the beginning.

Beyond outlining core job functions, leaders need to answer several key questions:

  1. How exactly does the person in this role perform to their highest capacity?

  2. What behaviors, values and motivators are required?

  3. How does excellence present itself in this role?

  4. How does the employee know that they’re successful?

Core functions are still important, but only the first step.

Employees need the full recipe for how to be successful. Hiring managers and organizational leaders communicate, with clarity, what’s needed from the role to deliver on organizational promises and priorities.

They dig deep to uncover and identify (if the role could talk) what the role says it needs in terms of behaviors, values and competencies to perform to plan.

That way when it comes to hiring, the role has been clearly defined, Behavioral Interviewing can successful take place, and a star candidate can be placed in the correct role.

Assess & Align Roles with KeenAlignment

There’s no need to reinvent the wheel yourself.

KeenAlignment offers well-established, proven methods to help you uncover the purpose, key performance indicators, core focus competencies, behaviors, values, and actions that drive Role Analysis.

Our Role Analysis program provides you with the tools to set the right foundation to effectively hire and manage key positions in your organization.

The outcome is a complete hiring kit that includes Comprehensive Position Requirements, a Behavioral Interviewing Guide, and a Gold Standard Score Card for interviewing.

The Role Analysis program improves organizational performance management through accountability and practical tools for communication. It’s an organizational transformation that redefines how you and your employees view roles and responsibilities. Work with us to integrate your mission, vision, and values throughout every step of the employee life cycle and set your teams up for success.

What Our Clients Are Saying About KeenAlignment’s Role Analysis Program

We love our clients, and our Role Analysis offered through the Strategic People Operations service has yielded amazing benefits to them. Read some of their testimonials below!

We have hired KeenAlignment to help with two Role Analysis so far along with several IMX Assessments and debriefings for several of our key team leaders. If your company is in growth mode and you are looking to build up your leadership team and strengthen your company culture, I highly recommend connecting with Magi and her team. KeenAlignment is an amazing resource for businesses and a great asset for executives. -Thomas Newman, CEO, Pacific Ridge Builders, Santa Clara, CA

“KeenAlignment, Margaret and her staff have provided me and those in my organization the most amazing opportunity; and that is to drastically improve the culture of the organization. By  providing us with Leadership training, coaching, and tools that we can utilize daily, it has provided a platform for the business strategy and the people strategy to live together. Through the Conscious Hiring Process, we are now much more successful in hiring highly qualified candidates that contribute and impact that business at a higher level. Through role analysis and creating CPRs, we have been able to tie people to the overall mission, vision and values of the organization and people understand their true impact to the organization, and take pride in their contributions. Communication has greatly improved throughout the organization and we are able to reach team members on a whole new level and across various platforms. Thank you to Keen and their team for the tremendous impact they have had on our organization and my career.” -Tiffany Tremmel, Chief Talent Strategist, Clow Valve, IA

If you feel a role analysis would be beneficial to you and your company contact us for a FREE consult to learn about this service.


Strategic People Operations
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