Job Analysis, Role Design, and Competency Architecture

Introduction

A startup’s first employees are not merely occupants of predefined positions. They are often builders of markets, products, processes, and organizational capacity. Consequently, hiring cannot be reduced to matching applicants with static job titles. Founders must determine what work must be done, what outcomes matter, which decisions belong to whom, and which capabilities are needed now versus later.

Job analysis, role design, and competency architecture provide the foundation for these decisions. Job analysis identifies the work and its requirements. Role design organizes that work into a coherent area of accountability. Competency architecture translates strategic needs into observable capabilities and career expectations. Together, these practices help startups gain clarity without importing the rigid hierarchies and bureaucratic procedures of much larger organizations.

The central managerial challenge is paradoxical: startup roles must be broad enough to support adaptation but specific enough to prevent duplication, neglect, and conflict. Effective design therefore emphasizes outcomes, decision rights, interfaces, and learning rather than exhaustive task lists.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this chapter, readers should be able to:

1. Explain the purposes and methods of job analysis in an entrepreneurial organization.
2. Distinguish jobs, roles, positions, responsibilities, accountabilities, and competencies.
3. Design flexible roles using outcomes, boundaries, interfaces, and decision rights.
4. Write evidence-based startup job descriptions and success profiles.
5. Construct competency models and career levels appropriate to organizational scale.
6. Evaluate spans of control and coordination mechanisms without prematurely bureaucratizing the firm.
7. Identify ethical, legal, and governance risks in role and selection design.
8. Apply these ideas to an integrated startup staffing problem.

1. From Tasks to Value-Creating Work

A job is a relatively stable collection of work activities performed in an organization. A position is an instance of a job held by one person. A role is a pattern of expected contribution in a particular organizational context. One person may hold several roles in a startup: a chief technology officer may simultaneously be technical architect, recruiter, customer adviser, and incident lead.

A role should be understood as a system with five elements:

• Purpose: why the role exists.
• Outcomes: the results for which the role is accountable.
• Responsibilities: recurring areas of work used to produce those outcomes.
• Decision rights: decisions the role may make without additional approval.
• Interfaces: relationships through which the role receives inputs and delivers outputs.

This approach differs from a task-centered description. A task list can become obsolete when the product, technology, or market changes. Outcomes and decision boundaries are more durable. For example, “write weekly reports” is a task; “provide reliable visibility into customer retention and its drivers” is an outcome-oriented accountability.

Job analysis and work analysis

Job analysis is the systematic collection and interpretation of information about work, its context, and the requirements for performing it. In startups, analysis should include not only current work but also anticipated work during the next stage of growth. It is therefore useful to distinguish:

• Current-state analysis: what work is actually being performed now.
• Future-state analysis: what work must be added, removed, or professionalized to achieve the strategy.
• Criticality analysis: which responsibilities create the greatest risk or value.
• Interface analysis: where handoffs, dependencies, and decision conflicts occur.

A startup should not assume that the founder’s current activities define a permanent role. Founders often perform work because nobody else is available, not because that work belongs in their long-term position.

2. Theoretical Foundations for Role Design

Scientific management and its limits

Classical job design, associated with scientific management, sought efficiency through specialization, standardization, and formal control. Its strengths include clarity, repeatability, and measurable procedures. Its limitations are particularly serious in uncertain environments: narrow jobs can slow learning, reduce ownership, and create handoff costs.

The job characteristics perspective

The Job Characteristics Model emphasizes skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy, and feedback. These characteristics influence experienced meaningfulness, responsibility, and knowledge of results. The model remains useful for startups because broad roles can increase autonomy and task identity. However, breadth without priorities can become overload. Autonomy must therefore be paired with clear outcomes and accessible feedback.

Sociotechnical and systems perspectives

Sociotechnical approaches treat work as an interaction between people, technology, workflows, and institutional conditions. A role cannot be designed independently of its tools or information access. If a product manager is accountable for prioritization but lacks customer data, engineering estimates, or authority to sequence work, the role is structurally defective.

A systems perspective also highlights boundary spanning. Startup performance depends on activities crossing functional boundaries: sales informs product discovery, engineering affects customer trust, and finance constrains growth choices. Role design should clarify these interfaces rather than pretend that departments operate as isolated boxes.

Agency, stewardship, and psychological contracts

Agency theory emphasizes the problem of aligning individual decisions with organizational interests when information is distributed. Decision rights, incentives, and monitoring are relevant. Stewardship theory offers a complementary view: employees may act as committed custodians of a collective mission when trust, identity, and purpose are strong. Startup role design should use proportionate controls rather than assume either perfect trust or inevitable opportunism.

The psychological contract is the employee’s perceived set of mutual obligations. A startup may verbally promise autonomy, learning, and influence while operationally imposing narrow approval rules. Such inconsistency damages trust. A credible role description should communicate both the opportunity and the constraints.

3. Conducting Job Analysis in a Startup

A practical job-analysis process consists of six linked activities.

Step 1: Clarify strategic demand

Begin with the business model and near-term bottleneck. Ask:

• What must become true in the next 6–18 months?
• Which outcomes are currently constrained by insufficient capacity or expertise?
• Which responsibilities must remain with founders, and which should transfer?
• What risks would arise if the work were delayed or poorly executed?

The analysis should be anchored in strategy rather than in an employee’s preferred title.

Step 2: Gather evidence about actual work

Useful methods include structured interviews, observation, work diaries, critical-incident interviews, document review, workflow mapping, and stakeholder surveys. A single interview is rarely sufficient because incumbents, managers, customers, and collaborators perceive work differently.

A critical-incident interview asks for examples of unusually effective or ineffective performance: what happened, what decision was made, what information was available, and what consequences followed. This method reveals behaviors that generic competency lists often miss.

Step 3: Separate activities from outcomes

List major activities, then connect each to an intended result. For example:

This separation prevents the common mistake of treating busyness as performance.

Step 4: Identify requirements carefully

Requirements normally include knowledge, skills, abilities, behaviors, experience, credentials, and working conditions. Each requirement should be classified as:

• Essential: performance is not reasonably possible without it at entry or after defined training.
• Trainable: can be developed within a realistic onboarding period.
• Preferred: useful but not necessary.

This classification reduces unnecessary credential inflation and widens access to capable candidates.

Step 5: Map dependencies and decision rights

For each significant outcome, identify inputs, collaborators, approvals, escalation paths, and outputs. A lightweight decision-rights matrix may use the following labels:

• Recommend: develops an informed proposal.
• Decide: has final authority within stated boundaries.
• Execute: carries out the decision.
• Consult: provides relevant expertise before the decision.
• Inform: receives the decision or result.

Unlike a detailed bureaucracy, this matrix need only cover consequential or recurrent decisions.

Step 6: Validate and update

Review the draft with the hiring manager, likely peers, and—where possible—customers or users of the work. After hiring, revisit the role at regular growth milestones. A role description is a management instrument, not a permanent legal or organizational fossil.

4. Designing Flexible Roles Without Ambiguity

Flexibility is not the same as vagueness. A flexible role has a stable purpose and outcomes but permits discretion in methods and allows responsibilities to evolve. An ambiguous role lacks agreement about who owns results, what authority exists, or how success will be judged.

A useful role charter contains:

1. Role purpose in one or two sentences.
2. Three to six primary outcomes.
3. Core responsibilities associated with those outcomes.
4. Decision rights and limits.
5. Key interfaces and expected collaboration.
6. Measures or evidence of success.
7. First 30, 60, and 90-day priorities.
8. Expected evolution as the company grows.

Role ambiguity and role conflict

Role ambiguity occurs when expectations, authority, or evaluation criteria are unclear. Role conflict occurs when different stakeholders impose incompatible expectations. Both can produce stress, duplicated work, defensive behavior, and slow decisions.

Common warning signs include:

• Two people believe they own the same decision.
• Important work is repeatedly “everyone’s responsibility” and therefore nobody’s responsibility.
• A person is evaluated on outcomes over which they have no authority.
• Priorities change without an explicit trade-off.
• Job advertisements promise broad ownership but managers retain all meaningful decisions.

The remedy is not always more documentation. Often it is a direct conversation about priority, authority, and trade-offs.

The accountability-authority alignment test

For every major outcome, ask whether the role has sufficient:

• information,
• time and resources,
• capability or access to expertise,
• authority to act,
• feedback about results.

Accountability without these conditions is an attribution error: the organization assigns blame to an individual for a system-level constraint.

5. Job Descriptions and Success Profiles

A job description communicates the work, scope, context, and requirements of a role. A success profile describes the conditions and evidence that indicate successful performance. The two should be related but not identical.

A strong startup job description usually includes:

• job title and reporting relationship;
• mission and organizational context;
• primary outcomes;
• responsibilities stated as meaningful contributions;
• decision scope;
• key relationships;
• essential and trainable requirements;
• working conditions and location expectations;
• compensation and legally required information, where applicable;
• an inclusion and accommodation statement.

A success profile adds stage-specific evidence. For example, a first product operations hire might be expected to establish a reliable launch process, reduce avoidable release failures, and make cross-functional priorities visible. It should not simply repeat “excellent communication skills.”

Writing requirements as observable evidence

Weak requirement: “Must be a strategic thinker.”

Stronger requirement: “Can translate uncertain customer and market evidence into a prioritized set of experiments, explain assumptions, and revise decisions when evidence changes.”

The stronger statement identifies behavior and evidence. It can be assessed through work samples, structured interviews, references, or probationary objectives.

Avoiding credential inflation

A degree, brand-name employer, or arbitrary years-of-experience threshold may correlate with opportunity rather than capability. Requirements should be job-related, proportionate, and defensible. If a credential is legally required or genuinely necessary for safety, it should be stated explicitly; otherwise, demonstrated capability may be a better criterion.

6. Competency Architecture

A competency is an observable capability involving knowledge, skill, judgment, and behavior that contributes to effective performance. A competency model is not a personality inventory. It should describe behaviors that can be developed and assessed.

A startup competency architecture commonly contains four layers:

Capability, competency, and values

These terms should not be collapsed. A capability is the potential or capacity to perform a class of work. A competency is an assessable pattern of effective behavior in context. A value is a principle used to guide judgment. “Integrity” may be a value; “documents material assumptions and discloses conflicts before recommending a decision” is a behavior that operationalizes it.

Building a competency model

A defensible process is:

1. Identify strategically important work.
2. Examine critical incidents and high-impact decisions.
3. Distinguish effective from ineffective behaviors.
4. Group recurring behaviors into competency domains.
5. Define proficiency levels with observable indicators.
6. Test the model for relevance, accessibility, and bias.
7. Use it consistently in selection, onboarding, feedback, and development.

A model should be small enough to use. Ten deeply defined competencies are generally more useful than forty vague labels.

Proficiency levels

A four-level scale can suit an early-stage firm:

These labels describe contribution, not personal worth. Promotion should depend on sustained scope and evidence, not merely tenure.

7. Career Levels, Titles, and Growth

Career architecture answers how contribution can grow without requiring every capable employee to become a people manager. A dual-ladder approach distinguishes:

• Individual contributor progression: increasing technical or professional depth, scope, judgment, and influence.
• People leadership progression: increasing responsibility for direction, staffing, coaching, systems, and organizational outcomes.

Levels should be based on dimensions such as:

• complexity and ambiguity;
• size and significance of outcomes;
• independence and judgment;
• influence across teams;
• development of others;
• stewardship of risk and resources.

Titles should communicate useful information but should not substitute for decision rights. A “head of” title without authority or resources creates confusion internally and credibility problems externally. Conversely, delaying all titles can make accountability and compensation difficult to administer.

A lightweight startup level framework may contain three or four levels initially. It can expand when differences in scope become persistent and material. Formal promotion cycles, competency matrices, and salary bands should be introduced when they solve a demonstrated coordination or fairness problem—not merely because larger firms use them.

8. Spans of Control and Coordination

Span of control is the number of direct reports assigned to a manager. No universal optimal number exists. It depends on task complexity, employee experience, interdependence, geographic dispersion, managerial capability, and the maturity of operating systems.

A narrow span may support coaching and complex work but can create unnecessary hierarchy. A wide span may encourage autonomy but overwhelm managers and weaken development. In a startup, the more important question is often not “How many reports?” but “What coordination load does this manager carry?”

Relevant indicators include:

• frequency and complexity of decisions requiring managerial intervention;
• time available for coaching and performance management;
• number of cross-functional dependencies;
• employee experience and role clarity;
• quality of information systems and routines.

Coordination can be improved through shared objectives, decision protocols, written updates, planning cadences, and clear interfaces rather than additional managers. The aim is minimum viable structure: enough structure to make work reliable, but not so much that initiative and learning are suppressed.

9. A Practical Architecture for Decision Rights

Decision rights should be designed around decision types, not every individual action. A useful classification is:

• Reversible decisions: can be changed at low cost; push authority close to the work.
• Difficult-to-reverse decisions: require broader consultation and explicit risk review.
• Regulated or fiduciary decisions: require specialized oversight and documented controls.
• Cross-system decisions: require coordination because they affect multiple teams or stakeholders.

For each important decision, specify the accountable decision-maker, required consultation, decision deadline, escalation trigger, and communication requirement. This prevents both decision paralysis and unauthorized action.

Decision rights should also reflect legal responsibilities. For example, authority over hiring, compensation, data protection, safety, financial commitments, and regulated activities may require designated officers, segregation of duties, or documented approval under applicable law.

10. Technology and AI in Role Design

Digital tools can support job analysis by summarizing workflow data, identifying repeated handoffs, clustering task descriptions, and highlighting skill gaps. AI can help draft role descriptions or generate interview rubrics, but it should not be treated as an objective authority.

Risks include:

• reproducing historical bias in job advertisements or performance data;
• inferring sensitive attributes or using irrelevant proxies;
• obscuring the basis for a recommendation;
• surveillance that damages trust;
• defining work from digital traces while ignoring invisible collaboration;
• violating privacy, employment, or data-protection obligations.

Human review should verify that AI-generated requirements are job-related, that evaluation criteria are observable, and that candidates are not screened out through unjustified proxies. Organizations should document data sources, test adverse-impact risks where legally applicable, restrict access to personal data, and provide appropriate notice and review mechanisms.

11. Ethical, Legal, and Governance Considerations

Role design influences access to employment, pay, status, workload, and voice. Ethical design therefore requires more than operational efficiency.

First, selection requirements should be relevant and non-discriminatory. Avoid coded language, unnecessary physical or educational requirements, and assumptions about availability that exclude caregivers or disabled applicants. Provide reasonable accommodations as required by applicable law.

Second, workload must be realistic. “Startup flexibility” should not mean unlimited hours, permanent emergency availability, or unpriced emotional labor. Critical responsibilities should be resourced and prioritized.

Third, pay and promotion criteria should be transparent enough to support procedural fairness. Employees need to understand what expanded scope means and how decisions are made, even if the company cannot publish every salary detail.

Fourth, conflicts of interest should be managed. A founder should not unilaterally define a role, evaluate a close personal associate, and determine compensation without checks. Governance becomes especially important when startups receive investment, employ relatives, handle sensitive data, or operate in regulated markets.

12. Illustrative Case: Northstar Health Analytics

Background

Northstar Health Analytics is a fictional, illustrative startup providing a data platform to small clinics. It has 24 employees and recently secured enterprise customers. The founders want to hire a “Head of Customer Success and Operations.”

Problem

The proposed role combines onboarding, support, renewals, implementation, product feedback, and internal process improvement. Two existing employees already perform parts of this work. Sales promises implementation dates, engineering receives urgent requests directly from customers, and no one clearly owns renewal risk. The broad title attracts candidates, but interviews reveal incompatible assumptions about authority.

Analysis

Job analysis identifies three distinct outcome clusters:

1. Customers reach productive use of the platform.
2. Customer risks and renewal opportunities are visible and acted upon.
3. Feedback is translated into prioritized product and service improvements.

Implementation scheduling is currently performed by sales but depends on engineering capacity. Product prioritization belongs to the product lead, while the proposed hire should influence—but not unilaterally control—it. The role also lacks reliable customer-usage data.

The original description therefore creates accountability without adequate authority or information.

Approach and solution

Northstar redesigns the role as Director of Customer Outcomes, with a clear purpose: “Make customer value measurable and repeatable from implementation through renewal.” Its first-year outcomes are:

• establish an onboarding process with visible ownership and milestones;
• create a customer-health review based on agreed evidence;
• reduce preventable implementation delays;
• provide a structured evidence stream to product planning;
• coach two customer-facing employees.

Decision rights specify that the director may set customer-success operating routines, prioritize customer-risk interventions, and recommend implementation trade-offs. Sales retains commercial ownership of contract negotiation; engineering retains technical release authority; product retains product-roadmap decisions. A weekly cross-functional review handles conflicts.

The success profile emphasizes judgment under uncertainty, process design, customer communication, data interpretation, and influence without formal authority. “Ten years of healthcare experience” is removed as an automatic requirement; knowledge of healthcare regulation is treated as essential only where the role genuinely handles regulated obligations, and otherwise as a learnable or preferred attribute.

Outcome

After three months, Northstar reports fewer duplicated customer communications and clearer escalation paths. It discovers that the largest bottleneck is not customer-success headcount but the absence of product-usage instrumentation. The company therefore assigns an engineering sprint to data quality rather than hiring another support specialist. The case demonstrates that job analysis can prevent an organization from solving a system problem through an incorrectly designed role.

Learning points

• A broad title cannot compensate for conflicting decision rights.
• The correct unit of analysis is the value stream, not only the department.
• Success profiles should specify evidence and conditions, not slogans.
• Role design can reveal technology, workflow, and governance problems before recruitment begins.

13. Best Practices and Common Failure Modes

Best practices

• Start with strategic outcomes and bottlenecks.
• Use multiple sources of evidence about actual work.
• Separate essential, trainable, and preferred requirements.
• Define authority alongside accountability.
• Write observable behavioral indicators.
• Keep early competency models small and usable.
• Review roles at funding, product, and headcount inflection points.
• Use structured selection criteria consistently.
• Preserve employee voice when work changes.
• Introduce process only when it reduces a demonstrated risk or coordination cost.

Common failure modes

The founder clone: hiring someone to imitate the founder rather than designing a distinct role. This perpetuates founder dependence.

The everything role: combining several full-time jobs under one attractive title. This produces overload and weak accountability.

The title solution: changing titles without changing authority, resources, or scope.

The competency laundry list: creating numerous abstract traits that cannot be assessed or developed.

The static document: writing a job description once and ignoring changes in strategy.

The premature hierarchy: adding managers and approval layers before coordination demands justify them.

The hidden work problem: ignoring mentoring, emotional labor, documentation, and coordination because they are not visible in formal tasks.

Chapter Summary

Job analysis identifies the work, context, requirements, and evidence associated with organizational contribution. In startups, it should examine both current activities and future strategic needs. Role design converts that analysis into a coherent charter built around purpose, outcomes, responsibilities, interfaces, and decision rights.

Flexible roles are not vague roles. They preserve stable accountability while allowing methods and boundaries to evolve. Job descriptions communicate scope and requirements; success profiles define evidence of effective performance. Competency architecture translates strategic capability into observable behaviors and can support selection, onboarding, development, and career progression.

Career levels should reflect increasing complexity, judgment, scope, influence, and stewardship. Individual-contributor and people-leadership pathways should both be available. Spans of control should be evaluated in relation to coordination load rather than by universal rules. Startups should pursue minimum viable structure, adding formal systems when they solve real problems.

Finally, role design is an ethical and governance activity. Requirements must be relevant and inclusive, authority must match accountability, workload must be realistic, and AI-supported analysis must remain subject to human judgment, privacy protection, and bias review.

Key Terms

Job analysis: Systematic study of work activities, context, requirements, and performance conditions.

Job: A relatively stable collection of related work activities.

Position: A specific instance of a job held by one person.

Role: Expected pattern of contribution within a particular organizational context.

Accountability: Responsibility for achieving or stewarding an outcome.

Responsibility: An area of work undertaken to produce results.

Decision right: Authority to make a specified decision within defined boundaries.

Role ambiguity: Uncertainty about expectations, authority, or evaluation.

Role conflict: Incompatible expectations from different stakeholders.

Job description: Document communicating a role’s purpose, scope, work, and requirements.

Success profile: Description of evidence and conditions associated with effective performance.

Competency: Observable capability involving knowledge, skill, judgment, and behavior.

Competency architecture: Structured system of organizational, functional, role, and leadership competencies.

Career level: Defined stage of contribution based on scope, complexity, judgment, and influence.

Span of control: Number of direct reports assigned to a manager.

Interface: Relationship through which a role receives inputs or delivers outputs.

Critical incident: Specific example of especially effective or ineffective performance.

Minimum viable structure: The smallest amount of formal coordination needed for reliable work.

Credential inflation: Requiring qualifications beyond those genuinely needed for performance.

Psychological contract: Perceived mutual obligations between employee and organization.

Review Questions

5 Short Answer Questions

1. What are the five elements of a well-designed role?
2. How does an outcome differ from a task?
3. Define role ambiguity and identify one consequence.
4. What is the difference between a competency and a value?
5. Why should spans of control not be determined by a universal numerical rule?

5 Long Answer Questions

1. Explain how job analysis in a startup differs from job analysis in a mature, stable organization.
2. Compare task-centered and outcome-centered approaches to job description design.
3. Discuss how decision rights can reduce role conflict without creating excessive bureaucracy.
4. Explain how a competency architecture can support both selection and employee development.
5. Evaluate the ethical and governance risks of using AI to generate or assess startup roles.

3 Analytical / Application Questions

1. A startup assigns one employee responsibility for customer retention but gives the employee no access to usage data and no influence over product defects. Diagnose the role-design problem and propose corrections.
2. Design a lightweight role charter for a first operations hire in a 15-person software startup. Include purpose, four outcomes, decision rights, interfaces, and success evidence.
3. A company has six team leaders, each with two direct reports, but decisions remain slow and employees receive conflicting instructions. Analyze whether adding more managers would solve the problem and recommend alternative coordination mechanisms.

Multiple Choice Questions with Answers

Question 1

Which statement best distinguishes a role from a job?

A. A role is always narrower than a job.

B. A role describes expected contribution in a particular context, while a job is a relatively stable collection of work activities.

C. A role is a legal document, while a job is an informal agreement.

D. A role applies only to managers, while a job applies only to employees.

Correct Answer: B. A role describes expected contribution in a particular context, while a job is a relatively stable collection of work activities.

Question 2

Which item is most clearly an outcome rather than a task?

A. Attend a weekly meeting.

B. Prepare a spreadsheet every Friday.

C. Provide reliable visibility into customer retention drivers.

D. Send ten follow-up emails.

Correct Answer: C. Provide reliable visibility into customer retention drivers.

Question 3

What is the main danger of assigning accountability without authority?

A. The role becomes automatically more senior.

B. The employee may be evaluated on results they cannot reasonably influence.

C. The organization eliminates all role conflict.

D. The company will necessarily increase its span of control.

Correct Answer: B. The employee may be evaluated on results they cannot reasonably influence.

Question 4

Which requirement is written in the most observable and assessable form?

A. Must be a strategic thinker.

B. Must have an excellent personality.

C. Must fit the startup culture.

D. Can translate uncertain evidence into prioritized experiments and revise decisions when evidence changes.

Correct Answer: D. Can translate uncertain evidence into prioritized experiments and revise decisions when evidence changes.

Question 5

Which is a component of competency architecture?

A. Only formal academic credentials.

B. Organizational, functional, role-specific, and leadership competencies.

C. Only personality traits measured by an assessment test.

D. Only the list of an employee’s daily tasks.

Correct Answer: B. Organizational, functional, role-specific, and leadership competencies.

Question 6

What is the purpose of a success profile?

A. To replace all performance conversations.

B. To describe evidence and conditions associated with effective performance.

C. To guarantee that a candidate has a specific degree.

D. To establish a universal span of control.

Correct Answer: B. To describe evidence and conditions associated with effective performance.

Question 7

Which decision should generally receive broader consultation than a low-cost reversible decision?

A. Choosing between two equivalent meeting times.

B. Editing a draft internal message.

C. A difficult-to-reverse decision affecting multiple organizational systems.

D. Selecting a personal note-taking method.

Correct Answer: C. A difficult-to-reverse decision affecting multiple organizational systems.

Question 8

What does minimum viable structure mean in a startup?

A. No formal structure until the company becomes large.

B. The smallest amount of formal coordination needed for reliable work.

C. A structure in which every decision requires founder approval.

D. A fixed hierarchy copied from a large corporation.

Correct Answer: B. The smallest amount of formal coordination needed for reliable work.

Question 9

Which is a likely warning sign of role ambiguity?

A. A role has a clear purpose and defined decision boundaries.

B. Two people believe they own the same consequential decision.

C. Employees receive feedback about outcomes.

D. A role is reviewed after a major strategic change.

Correct Answer: B. Two people believe they own the same consequential decision.

Question 10

Why can AI-generated job requirements create governance risk?

A. AI can only generate technical job titles.

B. AI outputs are always too short for recruitment.

C. AI may reproduce historical bias or use irrelevant proxies in selection criteria.

D. AI prevents organizations from defining competencies.

Correct Answer: C. AI may reproduce historical bias or use irrelevant proxies in selection criteria.