Staffing and recruitment is an essential aspect human resource management and labor planning. It is part of the organizational strategy for effectiveness and competitiveness within the marketplace. This paper provides a detailed research on the process of staffing and recruitment. Through a literature review study, the paper highlights on emerging issues related to staffing and recruitment. In order to address the issues or challenges, the paper provides approaches adopted by an organization to mitigate the negative impact of the challenges.
Staffing and Recruitment
Staffing and recruitment falls under organizational labor planning. It seeks to maintain and improve the ability of an organization to attain its entire strategic objective through the development of labor contribution. When an organization develops a wrong labor planning, there can be a lot of disruption, which will affect the organization adversely. The process of staffing in companies includes recruitment of human resource, selection, training, and promotion. Other processes such as retirement, transfer, and demotion also make part of the staffing process. Therefore, recruitment is an initial step of staffing. The entire process of staffing continues with the experience of employees within an organization.
The process of recruitment
The human resource personnel manager is responsible for coordinating the process of staffing and recruitment. This is an extremely conscious process that does not require mistakes to be made. Mistakes can lead to substantial consequences that would pose a serious threat to an organization. The mistakes can affect the brand value of an organization as well as disrupt operations. The manager in charge of recruitment has to define primary and essential skills that are required for each role within an organization. In addition, the education qualification and experience are also to be defined.
After defining all the essential requirements, appropriate methods of inviting applications need to be selected. Instead of looking for external applicants, the manager could also invite internal staff to make application for specific positions. It is easy to verify and conduct a background check for the internal staff compared to external applicants. However, for the external applicants, the use of placement consultant and advertising media such as the internet, and newspaper can be immensely helpful.
Once job applications are received, screening is needed in order to shortlist the candidates with the basic qualification requirements. The shortlisted candidates can be informed of the progress of their application and be called for interviews and aptitude tests. During the interview, the panel should have the expectation from each of the candidates. The answers from the candidates need to come out freely without the panel giving them any clues or coercing them. From the interview and tests, the best qualified candidates for the positions can now be easily selected.
The process of staffing
The entire experience and stages of an employee in an organization constitute the existence of the process of staffing. Once an employee has been recruited for a position, the human resource team needs to identify the individual skills of the employee’s individual skills and integrate them to the skills required for the job. This is achieved through proper training. There is usually a difference in the required skills for the job and the employee’s individual skills. Depending on the size of the gap or difference, the human resource team should be able to come up with proper training for bridging the gap. Training therefore serves a pivotal role of making the employees competent by giving them the confidence to face the task before them.
Each employee within an organization need to be developing and growing in his/her career in order to add value to the organization. Therefore\, staffing process takes care of transfers and promotions of employees. Employees need to be aware of opportunities for growth within the company. This should be clearly communicated to them and the procedure blueprinted. For instance, in most organization, the path up the career ladder is usually certified through performance appraisals. The employees that qualify for promotions must have performed extremely well to deserve the promotions.
The systems of performance appraisals focus mainly on the employees who have contributed to the achievement of organizational goals and are also still in a position to assist the organization continue attaining its goals. Promotion is a human resource management best practice that helps to retain employees for long as well as motivating them to perform. Promotion can be monetary or non-monetary. Nonetheless, it has to be an opportunity for the individual employees to grow personally. Performance appraisals are not only aimed at identifying best performing and highly productive employees, but are also aimed at identifying poor performing employees. This is important for an organization because poor performing employees negatively affect performance of an organization. There is therefore need to improve their individual performance and talent. However, if the attempt to improve their talent fails, then the best option is to demote them or force them to quite.
In order to retain employees, the human resource department needs to be aware of the individual goals of each employee. It is from the knowledge that they are able to help the employees achieve their personal goals within the organization. Retaining employees is not only achieved through increasing the employees’ compensation packages. They have to climb up their career ladder\, and their need for self-actualization is realized. Career prospects can also be achieved through job rotation. The company creates new opportunities and helps in fixing the skills of the employees to match with the new opportunity. This responsibility lies upon the human resource department in charge of staffing.
Methods of recruitment and their impact on performance
Most researches on human resource management focus on large organizations. This is particularly, researches on recruitment and staffing process. However, in order for the small firms to experience success in business, one of the key determining factors is the process of recruitment and staffing . Research on recruitment within the large organizations may have vital things to learn that are different from the researches on recruitment within small firms. Because there are a limited number of researches on staffing and recruitment in small firms, it is not easy to offer advices on human resource management to small firms .
From various literature sources, there are two different types of recruitment associated with organization . There is the formal recruitment process that involves the use of advertising media such as newspapers and internet. Then there is informal recruitment that involves the use of the word of mouth. For small firms, they tend to use the informal recruitment process where they advertise the position through the use of the word of mouth. The entire recruitment process as described earlier in the paper may not be observed. There is no much emphasis on getting the best qualified candidate for a position . However, for the large firms, recruitment process is conducted formally and each of the steps followed according to the letter. There is an emphasis on getting the best qualified candidate for a position .
The size of an organization may not be the only factor that determines the method of recruitment. Recruitment methods vary with industries. For instance in the old manufacturing industries that do not require technological expertise, recruitment can be informal. However, formal recruitment methods have to be widely used in the high technology industry. The type of position to be filled also influences the method of recruitment to be used within an organization. Manual employees can be recruited informally because of the nature of work they will be expected to do. In most cases, such positions do not require high technical skills. Front office employees and technical employees may have to be recruited formally and subjected through the entire process. This is because they have a strategic role in the success of the organization. Front office employees come into contact with clients and they actually need to have skills for customer relations .
According human resource literature, recruitment is mainly supported by the specification, analysis and description of a particular job. This will however best apply in large firms that have numerous positions with different roles to play. For the small firms, the manager will only have to establish the main tasks for each employee. Aspects such as job specification, analysis, and the description may not apply to the small firms. According human resource management studies some methods of informal recruitment may produce employees who are highly motivated and thus remain with an organization for longer periods. Researchers have also conducted studies to identify whether there is any correlation between performance of the recruits and the methods used to recruit them. According to Taylor et al (1999) supervisors, give high appraisals to employees who were recruited through informal means compared other employees recruited through formal methods.
Several researches have also been done to explain the reason why some methods of recruitment produce better performing employees compared to others. Some of the explanations are based on the hypothesis of individual differences. Recruits from different sources have varying personalities, motivation, personal attributes, and abilities. All these factors may influence the way individual recruits perform in a specific job. Informal methods may attract friends and acquaintances of the existing employees making it easy for them to work together and be motivated towards organizational goals.
However, for formal methods of recruitment, the attracted applicants come from a diverse population with different abilities. A word of mouth recruitment method can also be based on referral. This provides an accurate recruitment based on the information provided about the applicant. Employees who have been referred by other employees may easily be supported and mentored by the existing employees making it easy for them to perform. In certain industries such as the hospitality industry, existing employees are sometimes given bonuses when they successfully help to recruit new employees.
Staffing issues and strategies
A number of researches have been done to investigate the major issues that pose a challenge to staffing of employees. The researches have also focused on the approaches used by different organization to address the emerging issues. Within the last decade, there have been challenges in the human resource departments in relation to staffing. These challenges vary with the level of development of a region or a country. For instance, the challenges faced in developed countries are different from the ones faced in developing countries.
Workforce diversity is one of the main dominant staffing issues experienced by organizations. With increase in globalization, many organizations find themselves having a multicultural workforce. Women, minority community, immigrants, and the elderly are making job applications. Labor laws in almost any country require that companies have a balance workforce in terms of gender, and ethnic communities within its location. The challenge is in staffing professionals and specialties. The organizations also have to recognize the cultural needs of their employees and address them appropriately. Adapting to the diversity provides the organizations with the opportunity to retain staff for longer periods. At the same time, such an organization is able to get the best out of each of their employees.
The other emerging issue is the greater demands for training and education. The workforce definitely matures over time and this requires that the organization create opportunities for their growth. Training and education of various fields in the market is advancing with time as current technology is integrated in almost every aspect of life. Organizations find it challenging to retain the old employees who do not the current skills and knowledge required for a company to remain competitive in the market. This therefore forces companies to make new recruitments who are enthusiastic and motivated with the latest education and training.
In order to address these challenges, companies have come up with various strategies. The issue of women employment requires that companies link family needs of female employees and work. Even though women employees may be very talented, the usually have a hard time trying to juggle personal responsibilities and work Staffing and recruitment. However, when a company responds to family issues of employees, they are able to direct their focus to work when need arises. It curbs practices such as absenteeism, lateness, general stress. Companies also offer flexible work arrangements to help address the challenges of staffing. Employees can be allowed to carry work at home and sometimes work from home. In some cases, they are allowed to come to work at a convenient time that does not interfere with their personal life.
Training and capacity development is another common strategy used by companies to address staffing issues. The old employees who may not have updated skills and training can be subjected to capacity building program that allows them to update their education and training. Other strategies include job hopping, part time and contract employment, and accommodation of legal constraints.
Refrerences
Chew, I., & Sharma, B. (2006). The effects of culture and HRM practices on firm perfomance. international journal of manpower, 560-581.
Gans, N., & Zhou, Y.-P. (2002). Managing learning and turnover in employee staffing. Operations Research, 50 (6), 991.
Guinn, S., Phelps, S., Mason, M., & Rosen, B. (2006). The Changing Workforce. Training & Development Journal, 43 (12), 36-9.
Tarique, I., & Schuler, R. (2008). Emerging issues and challenges in global staffing: a North American Perspective. The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 19, ( 8), 1397–1415.
Taylor, M., & Schmidt, D. W. (1999). A process orriented investigation of recruitment source effectiveness. Personnel Psychology, 134 (1), pp, 343.
