HRM challenges
The United States of America is proud to have the greatest work force in the world. Not from the quantitative point of view – counties like China or India have much greater labor pools, but definitely in terms of quality. With over 56 million of college graduates available on the market, America has a large pool of professionals, and problems in human resource management for private and official entities may seem artificial. Nevertheless, there are plenty of issues that HR specialists of this country need to address, and the number of problems they face does not tend to decrease.
Main HRM challenges in the USA
The challenges that human resource professionals may be separated into three groups depending on the level of the problem and a possibility of improvement. Such division leaves HRs with issues of micro, meso and macro level. All three groups are interrelated, and shifts of solutions in one may directly or indirectly impact the others.
The first group consists of the challenges that professionals face at the level of their companies or related to the specific segment of the job market (Armstrong et al., 18). The list includes but is not limited to the hiring and laying off employees, financial and non-monetary compensation, issues with diversity etc. The meso group involves problems that originate at a regional or national level, usually as a result of particular legislation or executive measures. The macro group of problems consists of the issues that either involve the global labor market, economies and politics, or suffers impact from large-scale processes that are beyond reach for particular policy makers and have a natural cause. All three groups are to be assessed in detail below.
Micro level of HR-related challenges in the US companies
At the local internal and partially external level human resource professionals in the United States tend to face the following issues (Gatewood et al., 113):
Identification and hire of professionals for the right jobs.
This issue may sound quite surprising for the nation with the best educational system in the world, with millions of eager and motivated professionals and extremely developed communication channels. While all of this is true, every legal entity in the country has access to this pool. The miracle of the market economy is that it is not enough to be the best, a company has to be better than that in order to compete and survive, that’s why it only needs the fittest and the most professional candidates who, in their turn are being hunted by others. The problem has two dimensions – internal and external. The internal dimension includes the problem of a detailed, thorough, comprehensive analysis of what particular candidate features would be most suitable for a given position in order to maximize the created value. The internal aspect of the problem is getting the right candidates before competitors do. Given the high degree of the labor mobility within the USA, it has become a nationwide hunt.
Conduction of employee termination and layoff.
America is an extremely politically correct country, and laying off those who are protected by the public opinion (e.g. minorities) may result in numerous lawsuits. The HR professionals must balance between economic common sense on the one hand and possible reputational and legal losses, on the other.
Management of benefits and perks.
Almost all companies in the country have pension plans, discounted insurance, paid vacation etc. It is not easy to lure successful candidates with a standard package, therefore making a prominent offer remains one of the hardest tasks for human resources.
Equity of internal and external compensation.
If a specialist is underpaid and receives a better offer elsewhere, his or her days in the original company are counted. In order to avoid this, HRs have to monitor the market and adjust the compensation of the valued employees. The market, however, is so diverse, that it is not always possible to find an exact match, and HRs are forced to compare pears to apples and guess the fair price of labor.
Meso level of HR-related challenges in the US companies
At the regional and sectoral levels human resource professionals in the United States tend to face the following issues (Storey, 81):
Workplace diversity
As it was mentioned above, the issue of diversity and racial, gender, confessional and other equity are being taken quite seriously in the States. Regional and federal legislation usually imposes quotas for diverse workforce, and employers are supposed to tolerate and accept these rules of the game. This does not necessarily comply with the strategy of corporate development, so HRs try to make up to this gap.
Change management
It is not a coincidence that America was selected as a reference country for this research. The economy grows and evolves so rapidly that change, or transformation management has become a must for all areas of a business entity, including HR. The mentioned professionals are required to be flexible and responsive to the conjuncture that tends to change every week. It is not possible to rest on the laurels of HR till retirement, as it is in India or China.
Training and development of workforce
Normally this issue exists at a micro level, however, an innovative economy requires continuous training and professional development at a national scale, therefore making it a universal concern for HRs around the nation.
Macro level of HR-related challenges in the US companies
At the national and global levels human resource professionals in the United States tend to face the following issues (Sparrow et al., 202):
New developments in technology
Social and professional electronic networking, cloud technologies and internet of things have changed the face of the industry, and HR is no exception. The HR professionals are expected to catch up with the newest technological advances in order to remain competitive and maximize the efficiency of own professional efforts.
Demographic and trans-border changes
The population is aging, the immigrants are arriving, the people are migrating. Nothing is stable and everything changes all the time. In order to assemble a preserve a strong professional team, HR professionals need to keep a hand on the pulse of the nation and make early action in case of necessity.
The impact of the economy
American economy, due to its scale and openness, is particularly responsive to economic turbulence in any corner of the globe. Budget cuts, massive lay-offs, corporate extinction, innovative breakthroughs – all these events may happen overnight and bury the fruits of years of efforts in assembling a team suitable for the company.
Overcoming HR challenges in the USA
For this part, two challenges have been selected, both from the micro level, namely – selection of the right candidates and regulation of compensation and benefits.
Selection of the right candidates
While it depends on the nature and rank of the job, a vast majority of white-collar candidates receive a background check of some kind. While jobs requiring security clearance (mainly in government and national defense) are filled with candidates throughout multistage selection process which may take months or even years, less demanding companies also prefer to know their employees. Apart from criminal record check using federal databases, which is required at any position involving financial transactions, family and health history of a candidate can also be checked. No one forces him or her to give a consent for such a check, however everyone understands the rules of the game – disagreement with such checks will put the candidate’s resume on the bottom of the pile. Recently, due to the development of social and professional networks, it became possible to create a psychological portrait of a candidate before he or she even steps in for an interview. This advancement allows to eliminate the unfit candidates at early stages without violating rules of ethics and etiquette. While the mistakes are not impossible, all aspects of the personal background are evaluated before the final decision is made. An average American is like a hare on the fresh snow – every his or her step is well recorded and kept, and a cunning employer can find out everything or almost everything on a candidate.
As for the internal expectations, they are normally well developed and presented before the hunt for applicants even begins. This is the extent of professionalism of the American human resource professionals.
Regulation of compensation and benefits
New economy has brought many technologic advancements that made the HR tasks less impossible than before. The digital systems of human resource management (HRM) allow to achieve a personalized approach to every employee and determine the exact amount of compensation that he or she may expect to receive (Jackson et al., 48). Furthermore, as the HR has access to all the personal details within seconds and may use automatic computation of benefits and available perks, the management of the company may receive daily updates on the sticks and carrots that can be used to stimulate the employees. The overall approach in the American HR is in the past. Nowadays every single relationship between an employer and an employee is unique and has a one of a kind set of particular perks and benefits. Speaking of the particular amount of compensation, an employer usually has an informational advantage, as employees usually only have access to the openly available data with a high degree of approximation, and therefore cannot use these figures in negotiations with the employer.
Summing it up, HR practices in the USA are becoming more and more bespoke, accommodating needs of a particular employee on the one hand, but securing the interests of the employer, on the other. The market of HR services in the USA is extremely large and rapidly developing due to the nature of the open market economy, and there is no doubt that new challenges that American HRs are facing these days due to both internal and external reasons, will result in more innovative and sophisticated solutions. The HR services in the past 20 years experienced greater evolution than could have got for 100 years in less developed countries, so the further progress is beyond question.
Works cited:
Armstrong, Michael, and Stephen Taylor. Armstrong's handbook of human resource management practice. Kogan Page Publishers, 2014.
Gatewood, Robert, Hubert S. Feild, and Murray Barrick. Human resource selection. Nelson Education, 2015.
Storey, John. New Perspectives on Human Resource Management (Routledge Revivals). Routledge, 2014.
Sparrow, Paul, Chris Brewster, and Chul Chung. Globalizing human resource management. Routledge, 2016.
Jackson, Susan E., Randall S. Schuler, and Kaifeng Jiang. "An aspirational framework for strategic human resource management." The Academy of Management Annals 8.1 (2014): 1-56.
