You define roles to represent the ways that different groups of employees work. In Oracle HRMS you can use jobs or positions, or a combination, to define roles.

Job: A job is a generic role within a Business Group, which is independent of any single organization. For example, the jobs Manager and Consultant can occur in many organizations. You can also use jobs to set up supplementary roles that an employee might hold, for example, fire warden, or health and safety officer. You can distinguish these supplementary roles from other jobs by using Job Groups.

Position: A position is a specific occurrence of one job, fixed within one organization. For example, the position Finance Manager would be an instance of the job of Manager in the Finance organization. The position belongs to the organization. There may be one, many, or no holders of a position at any time.

Example

In a large structured organization, you may have a permanent establishment of positions for most of your employees.

However, you may also have groups of employees hired to perform specific tasks. This can be on a temporary or a permanent basis. Staff in this category can include agency workers, consultants and contractors. For these staff, you can define the role more flexibly as a job.

Model Your Organization and Roles

When you plan how to model your organizations and roles, consider the following points:

• Positions are normally used in role-based enterprise structures where clearly defined rules largely determine the ways employees work, and the compensation and benefits they receive.

• To manage fixed establishments of posts that exist independently of the employee assignment, it is best to use positions.

If you decide to use positions to represent your enterprise structures you need to consider carefully how to use organizations.

Positions provide you with a finer degree of structural definition and control than organizations on their own. You can use both organizations and positions to represent your reporting structures. However, if you define both, you must also maintain both over time. This may lead you into duplication of effort and information.

Use organizations to show your highest level of departments or divisions. Use positions and position hierarchies to show the reporting groups existing in your enterprise.

If you use positions to define roles, you can use Oracle's position and budget functionality to stay within budget and adjust position expenditures or budgets in response to changes in organizations, personnel, and funding sources. You can also use Oracle Workflow for routing position definitions and budgets for approval, and configure predefined business rules that perform necessary validations. See: Position Control.

Additional Information About Roles

As you define roles in your enterprise you can describe their responsibilities, requirements, and working conditions. This can be done in a number of ways:

• For positions you can enter the location, probation period and working hours in the standard fields. Entering location and working hours for an organization provides a default for all positions within that organization.

• You can attach documents, for example, text describing the objectives and tasks of the job or position, to each record.

• You can add up to twenty additional fields to each window in a descriptive flexfield. These fields can be global (they always appear) or context-sensitive (they appear only when triggered by another piece of information). For example, you could set up fields to record the health and safety requirements of a position, or its suitability for job share.

• You can add any number of Extra Information Types (EITs). This would enable you to set up fields to hold information to which only users with certain responsibilities would have access. For example, you could set up fields only to be used by managers.

• You can enter competencies against both jobs and positions. Then, using the suitability matching tool, you can match employees' competencies to those required by a job or position. This enables you to identify training needs or rank potential successors. You can also enter which position is the planned successor for each position in your enterprise.

Job Groups

Each job is held in a job group. The job group is used to store jobs of a similar type together in one group. All standard jobs created in Oracle HRMS, that is, those jobs that define the role the person is employed to fulfil, must be stored in the Default HR Job Group. This job group is automatically created for your business group is given the same display name as the business group. The internal name for the job group is of the format HR_<Business_Group_ID>, for example HR_2273.

Only jobs entered in the Default HR Job Group will be available in other windows in Oracle HRMS such as Position, Competencies, or Assignment. The only windows within Oracle HRMS that can access jobs outside of the Default HR Job Group are the Supplementary Roles window and the Elections window.

You can set up additional job groups to store supplementary roles that your employees might fulfil. These would be performed in addition to the roles described above and could be as a result of company defined initiatives like fire warden, or defined by legislation such as health and safety representative.

See: Workers' Representation and Supplementary Roles

You can also set up job groups to be used by Oracle Projects.

The way in which your enterprise uses job groups will depend on the setting of the HR:Cross Business Group profile option. If this is set to Y then you can create global job groups that can be accessed by all business groups on your system. If it is set to N then you can only create job groups for use within your business group.