Plenty of studies have shown that hiring the right people for your business is essential on an organizational as well as a financial level.  Hiring and training cost money, and, if the hiring process does not result in a good fit, the employee may leave. 

One organization based in a major city has developed a reputation for lying to prospective employees to get them in the door.  However, this is not a good move financially.  The employees who are more qualified quickly catch on to the company’s tactics and ultimately decide that it is not the kind of organization they want to be associated with.  The company would be better off being honest with job applicants.  It may lead to less qualified new hires, but it would also mean that the new hires are a better fit for what the jobs actually are.

There is another organization in the same city that had a history of placing people in the wrong job function for their skills.  One employee moved around to three different roles, yet each one was a worse fit for their unique talents.  The employee had useful skills for the company, but the organization did not know how to properly utilize them.

In both cases, the businesses were wasting money on the hiring process by not placing the right people in the right jobs.  Employees were not happy, and the organizations did not get the value that they could have gotten from those people.  Person-role alignment is incredibly important for the success of a business.

However, there is one more consideration that organizations need to be aware of.  That is – do you have the right jobs for your business? 

The evolution for most organizations begins when one person (or sometimes several people) has an idea for a business, and they start working on it.  They are the only employees at this point, so if a task needs to get done, they do it themselves.  Over time, the task lists grow, and the founders realize that they need to hire other people to help them out.  These extra tasks are consolidated into job functions and new employees are hired to take care of those tasks.  The task lists continue to expand as the business matures, and additional employees need to be hired to complete the work.

But there comes a point where the focus might be centered more on accomplishing tasks and less about the vision and mission of the organization.  One business was so task-focused, that the organizational structure had basically remained the same for over thirty years.  They expanded departments, of course, but each department was given the responsibility for completing the same tasks that the workforce had done at the company’s inception. 

On some levels, this is understandable as a business will always have the need to analyze financials and run operations, along with other usual business operations type of work.  However, how an organization approaches these responsibilities must evolve if a company is to survive in the future.  For example, it is one thing to create and maintain customer lists, it is another to require your staff to compile and edit these lists manually.  

Because this organization had so much manual computer labor that needed to be done, they were forced to hire extra employees.  Yet, one computer program could have replaced 5 employees.  This is not to say that employees should be let go once technology improves, but it is to say that employees’ job functions should constantly be evaluated with regards to the vision of the organization.  For this company, employees should not have been doing so much manual work.  Instead, they should have been tapped to work to improve the customer experience and business operations.  The organization was so focused on the tasks, they forgot why they were in business in the first place. 

This is more than just streamlining processes; the focus has to be on how people can be used to effectively move the organization forward.  It’s about having the most valuable jobs for the organization based on where it wants to go, not where it’s been.  Is your business more task-based or more vision-based in its organizational approach, particularly when it comes to job design?

The right people need to be in the right jobs, but more importantly, the right jobs should be put in place for the organization.