Human Resource Management
Employees are an important component of every business. Realization of this fact was behind the rise of personnel management, the specialized task of ob-taining the people a company needs and then overseeing their trading, evaluation, and compensation. In the 2010 top management also began to realize that, with the right jobs, businesses can compensate for short-falls in other areas. The term human resource management was adopted by many companies to reflect the attitude that workers are of strategic importance; human resource managers became integral members of management teams plotting a course through rough economic seas. Many companies focus on the training and supervision of their managerial employees so that they have the resources they need for steady growth.
Human resource management is becoming more complex and crucial as the 1990s approach. Technology and the business environment are changing at an accelerating pace, creating mismatches between worker’s skills and employers’ needs. Human resource managers must figure out how to keep good workers when economic difficulties make pay freezes necessary; how to lay off workers equitably; how to retrain workers to enable them to cope with increasing automation and computerization, how to deal with increasingly complex (and expensive) employee benefits, such as pensions and health insurance; how to encourage employees to work more productively; and how to cope with the challenge of equal opportunity in employment. Given the growing importance and complexity of human resource problems, it is scarcely surprising that all but the smallest businesses employ specialists to deal with them.
What exactly do human resource department do? Every human resource staff must perform this series of functions: planning, recruiting and selecting employees, training and developing workers, and appraising employment performance. A human resource staff gets involved in accommodating changes in employment status and in administering pay and employee benefits.
Internal and External Recruitment
Internal recruitment
Firms may recruit internally through promotion or redeployment of existing employees. This offers benefits:
· it is cheaper as it avoids the need for expensive external advertising,
· candidates will have experience of the business and may not require induction training,
· selection may be easier as more is know about the candidates. However, problems exist in recruiting internally.
· selection is from a smaller pool of available labour and the caliber of candidates may be lower. This can be significant for senior appointments,
· difficulties can result if employees are promoted from within –former colleagues may resent taking orders from those they formerly worked along-side.
External recruitment
Managers may be keen to have a wider choice of candidates and therefore advertise externally. The advantages of this approach are:
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· it is likely that higher quality candidates will be available following external recruitment even if advertisements are only placed in local media,
· external candidates will bring fresh ideas and enthusiasm into the business.
Documentation
The personnel department prepares the necessary documentation for the recruitment process.
Job adverts
Job adverts contain the following information:
· the job title
· some description of duties
· location
· the name of the business
· possibly salary and working hours.
The advert may be local for a relatively unskilled job. Highly skilled and professional positions might require advertising nationally or even internationally.
Job descriptions
Job descriptions may act as the basis for drawing up the advert for the post and relate to the position rather that the person. Typically, job descriptions contain the following information:
· the title of the post
· employment conditions
· some idea of tasks and duties
· to whom employees are responsible
· likely targets and standards employees are expected to meet.
Person or job specifications
Person or job specifications set out the qualifications and qualities required in an employee. The list might include:
· education and professional qualifications required
· character and personally traits expected
· physical characteristics needed
· experience necessary.
Recruitment can be an expensive exercise but is less costly than appointing the wrong employee and perhaps having to repeat the process.
Selections
Because of the costs involved in recruiting the wrong people, firms are investing more resources and time in the recruitment process. A number of techniques of selection exist:
· interviews remain the most common form of selection and may involve one or two interviewers or even a panel interview. Interviews are relatively cheap and allow the two-way exchange of information but are unreliable as a method of selection. Some people perform well at interview, but that does not necessary mean they will perform well when in the post,
· psychometric tests reveal more about the personality of a candidate than might be discovered through interview. Questions are frequently used to assess candidates’ management skills or ability to work within a team,
· aptitude tests may provide an insight into a candidate’s current ability and potential. Such tests can also be used to assess intelligence and job-related skills.