Human resource (HR) management is the process of hiring, developing, motivating, and evaluating employees to achieve organizational goals. The goals and strategies of the firm’s business model form the basis for making human resource management decisions. HR practices and systems comprise the firm’s human resource decision support system that is intended to make employees a key element for gaining competitive advantage.
To this end, the HR management process contains the following sequenced activities:
The human resource management process encourages the development of high-performance employees. The process is sequential because employees can’t be trained and paid until selected and placed in jobs, which follows recruitment, which is preceded by human resource planning and job analysis and design.
Good HR practices used along this sequence foster performance improvement, knowledge and skill development, and loyal employees who desire to remain with the organization.
Exhibit 3a.1. A job fair, career fair or career expo, are events in which employers, recruiters, and schools give information to potential employees and job seekers attend hoping to make a good impression to potential employers. They also interact with potential coworkers by speaking face-to-face, exchanging résumés, and asking questions in attempt to get a good feel on the work needed. Likewise, online job fairs are held, giving job seekers another way to get in contact with probable employers using the internet. How do you plan on using events like this in seeking your job? How can utilize the courses that you are taking to illustrate your skills that you can discuss at job fairs. (Credit: Taavi Burns/ flickr/ Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0))
Two important, and somewhat parallel, aspects of the human resource management process are determining employee needs of the firm and the jobs to be filled. When Alcon Labs gained approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for sales of a new contact lens disinfectant solution in its Opti-Free product line, it had to determine if additional sales representatives were needed and whether new sales positions with different knowledge and skill requirements should be established.
Human resource planning at Alcon means having the right number of people, with the right training, in the right jobs, to meet its sales goals for the new product. Once the need for sales representatives is determined, human resource specialists assess the skills of the firm’s existing employees to see whether new people must be hired or current people can be trained. See Exhibit 3.3 for a representation of the human resource management process.
Exhibit 3a.2. Human Resource Management Process (Attribution: Copyright Rice University, OpenStax, under CC BY 4.0 license.)
Human resource planners must know what skills different jobs require. Information about a specific job typically begins with a job analysis, which is a study of the tasks required to do a job well. This information is used to specify the essential skills, knowledge, and abilities required for the job. When Hubert Joly started as the CEO at Best Buy, the retailer was facing serious financial pressures. The threat of online competition from Amazon was real. Joly was also facing a staffing issue with a lot of turnover. He and his team instituted a plan to keep and promote staff as a core competency that would differentiate Best Buy from online retailers.2 Also, a key HR responsibility is that jobs are examined to make any changes in job duty and task responsibilities. The tasks and responsibilities of a job are listed in a job description. The skills, knowledge, and abilities a person must have to fill a job are spelled out in a job specification. These two documents help human resource planners find the right people for specific jobs. A sample job description and specification is shown in Table 8.1.
Forecasting an organization’s human resource needs, known as an HR demand forecast, is an essential aspect of HR planning.
This process involves two forecasts:
