Person+specification

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 Introduction
__A person specification__ is a profile of the ideal candidate for the job. It lists the criteria necessary to carry out the job. A well-crafted person specification has several benefits:
 * it enables potential applicants to determine whether they are capable of meeting the requirements of the job, filtering out unsuitable candidates at an early stage
 * it helps employers to identify what qualities are required to do the job
 * it can be used as a guide when devising job advertisements and application forms
 * it provides recruiters with a tool to systematically judge whether candidates meet the requirements and to compare one candidate with another
 * it can reduce bias in the recruitment and selection process by ensuring candidates are judged against criteria which are relevant to the job, and all candidates are judged systematically on the same criteria
 * it helps to ensure that your selection decisions can be justified using objective criteria should they be called into question at a later stage
 * once you have appointed a new employee, the person specification and job description can be used as the basis for staff development, appraisals, or promotion

What should be included in the person specification?
__**Skills, knowledge and aptitudes**__

//__knowledge and aptitudes__//
Include any skills, knowledge or aptitudes that the candidate needs – for example, oral, IT or written skills, or expertise in a particular field such as tort law or paediatric medicine. Make sure that these criteria are directly relevant to the job, i.e. will possessing these skills/knowledge/aptitudes enhance the candidates performance of this job?

__Experience__
You may want candidates to have prior experience of performing particular skills or tasks. This is a problematic area as experience requirements have the potential to discriminate. In particular, asking for a certain number of years' experience is likely to indirectly discriminate against younger employees (as they are likely to have been employed for less time) or those who have taken career breaks for any reason. However, there are ways round the problems created by experience requirements:


 * think about why you want to see evidence of previous experience. If it is to demonstrate that the candidate is capable of carrying out particular tasks, could this be demonstrated in alternative ways, for example through training or qualifications?
 * is experience really necessary, or merely an added bonus? It may be that prior experience is a desirable rather than necessary criterion that could be used to choose between very good candidates rather than a necessary criterion that will immediately rule out those who don't have it
 * do you need a certain number of years of experience? Rather than asking for, for example, '3 years experience in a HR role', you are more likely to recruit a suitable candidate if you ask for experience of carrying out particular tasks. For example, 'experience of drafting contracts and co-ordinating disciplinary procedures'. Otherwise you may overlook a candidate who has gained experience of a wide variety of tasks in 6 months in favour of a candidate who has spent 2 years in a much more limited role
 * if a candidate cannot demonstrate relevant experience through their professional life, they may be able to show that they have gained this experience through voluntary work or even through their personal life

__Qualifications, education and training__
Required qualifications must be necessary for satisfactory job performance. In some professions it will be a legal requirement that the candidate has certain qualifications in order to practice. In other cases it may be that it would be impossible to carry out certain tasks without having been trained to do them.

However, graduate recruitment schemes may be an exception. In this case a degree may not be an essential qualification to carry out the tasks that the candidate will initially have to perform, but can be used as evidence of future potential where this is the basis of recruitment.

As above, think about whether qualifications are the only way that a candidate could demonstrate that they are able to do the job. For example, a candidate who has no formal qualifications may instead have worked previously in a relevant sector and developed the necessary skills and knowledge. This can be harder to quantify.

[|http://www.how2become.co.uk/] An example of a person specification and how to understand it before you apply for a job or career.

**Type**
As explained above, there are two types of person-spec: simple and complex. A complex person-spec is one which contains further person-specs, which may themselves be simple or complex, and so on.

**Head**
The PN or other designator which is at the top of a person-spec container hierarchy is referred to as the head of the person-spec.

**Properties**
The information that is part of a person-spec may be thought of in terms of its properties. Person-spec properties include the name(s) of the person, relations such as 'son-of', daughter-of', and profession/role designations.

**Operators** Relators, profession and role designations may all be viewed as operators: relators are binary operators, applicable to two person-specs (normally the preceding and following person-specs). Profession and role designations are unary operators, applicable to only one person-spec (normally the preceding one, but in the case of Ur III transaction markers like ŋiri they may apply to the following person-spec). As a matter of discursive simplicity, this document tends to talk in terms of operators being applied to person-specs with the result that they contribute properties to the person-specs.

**Direction** Unary operators have an application direction, given as forward or backward. Operators that are applied forward contribute properties to the following person-spec; those which are applied backward contribute properties to the preceding person-spec.

**Scope** In a simple person-spec the scope is not an issue: the scope is person-spec. In complex person-specs, scope is the level at which designators are applied to a head, and we generalize those levels as outer, or top-level, and inner, or lower-level

**Topic 1-2 **






Direct discrimination and genuine occupational requirements
If the person specification explicitly states that the job is only open to people from a particular group (based on age, disability, race, religion/belief, sex or sexual orientation) or is not open to people from one of these groups, this would be a case of direct discrimination and is therefore illegal. The only exception is where there is a genuine occupational requirement (GOR) that the position be filled by someone who belongs to a particular group.

Indirect discrimination
If the criteria in the person specification are likely to disproportionately affect a particular group of people (based on their age, disability, race, religion/belief, sex or sexual orientation) this may be a case of indirect discrimination. For example, a requirement that the applicant has three years’ experience in a similar role would disproportionately disadvantage younger applicants. Indirect discrimination is illegal unless it can be objectively justified.

**References**
1. CareerVidz (2011,october 17). Person Specification Example [Video file] ,Retrieved from []
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see above nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn > [|CareerVidz], September 17,2011
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">Contributors
<span style="font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;"> Pasca Diana Larisa