Creating Job Descriptions and Benchmarking Practices: A Human Resource Management Field Exercise Serving Nonprofit Organizations

This article seeks to unpack and explain a helpful human resource management field exercise for business students that serves nonprofit organizations and provides tangible experience for students in interviewing, job description creation, and benchmarking best practices. This field exercise is designed to serve nonprofit organizations, given that many of these entities may not have well-developed or established human resource management practices. This article introduces the exercise, the background information related to conducting the project, explains which business classes this type of field exercise would be valuable in, and provides a road map for carrying out the exercise through practical steps, a grading rubric, and learning objectives that undergird the exercise. This human resource management field exercise has been used by an Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) school of business in the southeastern United States and has been carried out multiple times in a Human Resource and Organization Management MBA class.