Jobs and Positions framework is one of the core business concepts in Human resources that support how an organization executes the operational business and how the employees are linked with the organization structure. There are 2 analogies that I have come across to help explain this:
- Jobs are “types of chairs” while Positions are “specific chairs” where an employee can take seat and are arranged in a “hierarchical” way within the organization
- Jobs can be referred to the “palm” of the hand and Positions are the “fingers” which are arranged with “specific way (hierarchy)”
What are Jobs on Dynamics 365 for Talent?
Jobs are a collection of tasks and responsibilities that the employee is expected to perform. Other aspects of the job are:
- Required skills on the job: Each job has a set of required competencies (skills, certificates, tests, education and screenings) that can be used as reference to compare with the employee skills while hiring the employee or as the employees grows within the organization as part of the employee lifecycle.
- Job classification: Each job can be classified based on job functions, job types and job family based on the how the operations are segregated and how the Job are identified in comparison with the external job market.
– Manages people and Individual contributor are the examples of Job function – Executive and technical are the examples of Job type – Management and Information technology are the examples of Job family
Job classification is a flexible framework on Talent to segregate the jobs based on the internal operational needs of a organization, Reporting needs of an organization, External market alignment of the job framework based on a Job survey, Compensation structures within the organization or Performance review processes within an organization.
- Compensation levels: Each job is linked with a compensation grade of the organization to define how an employee on the job will be placed on the grade ladder of the company. The grades are local per country of presence of the organization and is linked with reference compensation pay values for example Minimum, Midpoint and Maximum.
- Job title: This is a slightly bigger topic and will be writing a follow up blog on Titles.
- Examples for a Job: IT Consultant, Accountant etc.
The picture below illustrates the Job framework with examples:
What are Positions on Dynamics 365 for Talent?
Positions on the other hand are specific instances of every job that is linked to a “Department”. Other aspects of the position are:
- Full Time Equivalent (FTE): Each position will have a specific FTE maintained based on the full-time/part-time factor of the employee working on the position. At the moment we can add FTE values that are greater than 1. Please vote for the idea to have a validation:
- Position type: This represents how positions are classified such as Full-time or Part-time. There are standard analytics based on this classification.
- Position title: This is a slightly bigger topic and will be writing a follow up blog on Titles.
- Position duration: Each position will have Effective start date, Retirement date and Available for assignment
- Hierarchy: Line manager and any other dotted line reporting hierarchy can be defined. Dynamics supports cross legal entity reporting between positions.
- Financial dimensions: Chart of accounts structure linked to the position for costing and reporting
- Examples for Positions based on the Job IT Consultant: IT HR Consultant, IT Sales Consultant, IT Network Consultant etc.
- Naming convention: As we have established that positions are specific instances of a Job linked to a department, it is worth considering other dimensions of the position such as business function of the department or geographical presence of the department and define a naming convention to support reporting needs of HR.
The picture below illustrates the position framework with examples:
Some critical points:
Both Jobs and Positions are shared across legal entities and are global objects from a technical standpoint.Many legacy applications work with only jobs or only positions framework and it is worth considering to move the direction of defining a clear job and position framework within the organization aligned with Talent.Also many legacy applications define manager reporting structure based on person to person and not on position to position, this is one of the strong concepts on Talent and needs to aligned. Essentially you can have vacant positions without employees on it but other positions reporting to it.Every position can have only one employee assigned to it but an employee can have more than one position assigned. (I think this will be a separate blog with detailed explanation!)
Want to know more about Dynamics 365 Human Resources… Stay tuned and subscribe to my blog😀:
Do you think my blog helped you? Then please share it with your network on LinkedIn!