| Frequently Asked Questions
What is JIMS?
First, what JIMS is not. It's NOT a place to find job
opennings or post resumes. However, if you are researching what jobs
exist within our government...you're in the right place.
One problem that human resources departments face is staying
competitive in today's job market. The best way to do this is to
constantly study and compare similar jobs in similar organizations. To do
this used to take significant resources, including many hours and telephone
calls.
JIMS will make the job easier. JIMS contributors put
their job-related information, including job titles, salary ranges, and job
descriptions from various organizations and adds it to a master database.
Human Resources professionals then can search that information when studying
other organizations' jobs and salary ranges using a Web-based search engine and
broad job-related search criteria.
How does it work?
First, the data. The front end of JIMS (or where the data
is collected at the individual HR departments) contains a web based program
that is designed to allow for easy and fast updating of the database.
Each participating organization is committed to inputting updated job
information into the system on a regular basis. The information stored
are individual jobs, pay ranges that are linked to the jobs, and matching jobs
found in other participating organizations.
Next, the research. From the Web page you can use the
search criteria to tailor your search to the particular job you are looking
for. After you submit your search request, JIMS chooses the jobs that
match your search criteria.
Who can use it?
Anyone can do research using JIMS. No limits and everything
that is available to the HR professionals is also available to you for
research. The logging in part is only for entering and updating data.
JIMS is designed to accept data from any school, airport,
municipality, county, or state government. Similarly, any
municipality, county, or state government can use JIMS to obtain valuable
job-related information.
Because of the different positions and benchmarks in the private
sector, JIMS is not well suited for organizations outside of the public sector.
Who runs this...and pays for it?
The City of Tempe has designed this program with the help of many
of the cities and towns in Arizona including Scottsdale, Phoenix, Tucson, Oro
Valley, Yuma, Glendale, Goodyear, Chandler, Mesa, Paradise Valley and Apache
Junction just to name a few. Human Resources Professionals from these
cities and towns did the impossible and found a way to encode jobs so that
they could be commonly classified. Computers use logic, and job
descriptions are not naturally easy to classify logically...but they did
it! It took 6 months from start to completion in about as many
meetings. JIMS has since gone through 2 total re-writes to keep up with
the newest technology. What started out as a floppy disk based system is
now totally web based and uses SQL Server 2000 to hold the data giving it speed
not seen before.
JIMS is run on one of the Web servers at Tempe. The server
is owned and operated by the City. The development and maintainance for
the program is provided by Information Technologies within the City of
Tempe. Tempe also maintains the list server used by the JIMS
participants.
Why did we do this?
As the saying goes..."Work smarter, not harder!" ... and ...
Because we could!
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