Without a doubt, 2020 has been a hugely disruptive year for businesses across North America.

We’re constantly talking to HR professionals in all sorts of industries, and we know that they’ve had huge demands on their shoulders. To keep up with the workload, they’ve been asked to work more efficiently and effectively – no small task, in the face of a work environment that is rapidly changing and evolving.

This need for efficiency is driving a lot of HR personnel in banks, credit unions, and financial services companies to revisit their job description processes.

Let's drill down and explore why:

1. It’s more important than ever for employees to have a clear understanding of their role and responsibilities.

With many banks forced to move to a largely dispersed, remote workforce, talent management personnel have had to quickly adapt to the new reality.

Employees who used to work in offices are no longer able to walk a few steps over to a colleague’s desk to ask them a quick question; junior employees have less opportunities to pick the brains of their more senior colleagues; managers have largely shifted to more formalized check-ins, instead of having more regular, informal feedback loops on a daily basis.

In this new reality, clarity is king.

An updated record of an employee's official responsibilities can be a great tool to keep them focused on the most important tasks/responsibilities they need to carry out, bigger picture, to be successful in their roles.

To take it a step further, including core competencies and job-family competencies on your job descriptions is an ideal way to ensure buy-in on the key values and behaviors needed to drive your organization, and its teams, forward.

2. In the current world of work, HR personnel are busy… and job descriptions take a lot of time.

Sure, hiring may not be top of mind right now. But as the economy recovers, forward-thinking HR teams want to be ready to move quickly and efficiently.

In our 2020 State of Job Descriptions Report, 100+ HR professionals told us that hiring for a new position is the #1 reason that drives the creation of new job descriptions.

The problem?

Most organizations’ job description processes are a drain on time and resources.

65% of our respondents said that each and every job description they work on takes 2 hours or longer.

And more broadly, 68% of our respondents told us that they know their process could be better.

Now, think about when things start to pick up, your organization is going on a hiring spree to support the new business coming in the door, and the company turns to you to create a whole bunch of new job descriptions.

An investment in your job description process now is going to save you a whole lot of pain later.

3. Job descriptions can form an important piece of your compliance strategy.

Compliance ranked third among our research respondents, across all industries, as a driving factor in job description creation.

And there’s perhaps no industry where compliance is more important than in financial services and banking.

Compliant job descriptions require a consistent format, yes, and highly accurate content; but it’s about more than just that.

It’s also about the paper-trail behind it: who was involved in determining the requirements, how were they kept up-to-date, and whether employees acknowledge the accuracy of their job description.

There are a lot of moving parts to this compliance process, but again, a lot of it boils down to process.

Without the right systems in place, establishing a repeatable process -- and consistency across your organization -- is next to impossible.

Having tools that allow you to establish those compliance pieces is a major help to banks, and one of the contributing factors to why we’ve seen such interest from the sector in our software over the past few years.

Use the power of AI to build better job descriptions, faster.

CompetencyCore by HRSG gives you the power to pull from huge content libraries, build descriptions quickly with AI suggestions, and manage your feedback process seamlessly in the #1 job description management tool. Here’s a 2-minute look at how it works for financial institutions:

Ready to think about investing in your bank’s job description process? Check out the full overview of CompetencyCore’s job description software functionality here.