The Roles and Purpose of Human Resource Management - Essay Example

MANAGING HUMAN RESOURCES Department Introduction Human resource management (HRM) refers to management of an organization’s work force. It deals entirely responsible for the process of employing, training and all human resource issues affecting employees. HRM plays an important role in ensuring quality of workforce. The recruitment and selection process entails methods and procedures that ensure that only the best workforce is acquired by an organization and in a cost effective manner. The contributions the two make provide tremendous growth for an organization workforce and competitiveness. Diversity of employees ensures that an organization has diverse and has a useful knowledge base to ensure that the company puts a competitive edge to her competitors. Diversity in an organization can be achieved by ensuring that the employees and other staff working within and throughout an organization are a representation of the wider society. The Roles and Purpose of Human Resource Management Human resource management (HRM) is the unit within an organization that deals with the workforce. It can be said to be the process of managing the workforce of an organization. It provides guidelines on how people are to work. An effective HRM ensure that the workforce is effective and productive for the overall accomplishment of the objective and goals of an organization (Bell, 2011 p. 30). It helps in full utilization of employees through a comprehensive and strategic management of the people as well as the working environment. An organization relies on good HRM to have a strong and effective team of employees. HRM aims at ensuring that the company remains loyal to the employees by making them feel the job there are doing is part of their personal life. Research has shown that HRM is the heartbeat of any organization; over eighty percent of the company success is attributed from the activities and skills of human resources. These activities include how the company attracts employees, how it trains and develops them and finally how effective is it in retaining the quality workforce. HRM helps the organization create a good environment for employees to work in as well as ensure there is respect and dignity between employer and employees. The main responsibility of HRM in an organization whether small or large corporate bodies is the welfare of the workforce. It must ensure that there is relatively low turnover of employees as this make the company waste a lot of resources ad can even lead to stagnated growth in case of a technical organization. It inspires and motivates employees to reduce turnover. This could be through offering training on relevant courses to the employees as this also promotes their development. Clarifying problems and providing solution is entirely dependent on how the HRM responds to the same effective control of the situation makes the employees work more efficiently. As stated by Wilton (2011 p. 9) HRM is also accredited with establishing good relations by communicating the ethical policies of an organization as well as the socially accepted behavior. Incase disputes arise between employer and employees it must provide quick and swift responses to avoid situation getting out of hand. HRM looks at how to preserve the knowledge they have as hiring a fresh is costly and the individual who may take up the left position may not match the one who left. Human resource management (HRM) is the most valued asset in successful organization. It involves the management of the workforce who either as individual or groups contributes to achievement of goals and objectives of a company. It is important as it links the organization with the employees. For a company to successful it must first meet the need of the employees so that there are able to deliver. HRM must capitalize on ensuring that the full potential of an employee is reached through motivating them and ensuring good working environment (Wilton, 2011 p.23). Recruitment and selection Recruitments refer to the process of getting capable individual to a pool in order to apply in an organization for employment. Recruitment forms an important part in HRM, starting from the job advertisement, attracting of qualified application for the job and ends at selection. Once there is need to hire the next step is to identify the source as well as the method to be used. To remain in a competitive advantage organization should ensure well established recruitment procedure and that referrals and networking are kept minimal. Clear policies should be laid down by HRM for recruitment so as to give the company the best and ensures that the organization remain competitive (Cowling & Mailer, 2013 p.26). Organizations are only able to deliver from the potential of her workforce. During recruitment, HRM draws up both strategy and plan to ensure hiring of the right minds is achieved. It designs job description, scope of work as well as the obligation of the hired employees. There are several methods in recruitment which include online recruitment where jobs are advertised in social media platform, company websites or on internet job boards. This has been widely accepted by organization as it hassles free and less costly. Whether for a small or large organization the workforce is what determines the performance level and company productivity .After recruitment in most cases the new staff are trained in order to sharpen the skills that they already have and development other new skills that the organization offers in order to be able to deliver once they take up their new roles. It is the duty of HRM to ensure the recruitment is cost effective and that it was done timely and above all the right person was hired for the position. In some organization, position on new recruitment are first done internally if no right candidate is found then they advertise to the public .In recruitment internal hiring is effect as no much induction is conducted since the applicant is not new to the company. Recruitment should be done in a timely and professional manner. Identify the position that need to be filled, review of the works task and duties of the position, how is work done in that position is permanent, part-time, a contract among others and finally ways to fill be position. Selecting the best suited individual ensures that the company gets the best service and thus can compete effectively with other organization. Selection can be on basis of background investigation and personality test (Bell, 2011 p. 27). Selecting of candidates ensures that the candidates that fill the position are well qualified. Conducting screen interviews ensure that short listing is done on the basis of who is better qualified. It also ensures that the applicant skills match the need of the company. Selection tests identify the skills not determined in interviews which are mainly verbal. They are valid, reliable and standardized to help predict a candidate’s success on a job. Selection test should test the skills needed for the job. For instance if the company needs Administrative assistance the instrument to be used in the test should be able to test the applicant knowledge on keyboard, a higher score ion keyboarding test would show some correlation to high performance on the job. Test help the selection panel only concentrate on qualified personnel. Recruitment and selection play vital role in shaping of how the organization performance and effectiveness is. The question for these two processes to HRM is how is the organization able to acquire individuals who have the right skills, knowledge and aptitude to be able to carry the goals and objective of the organization forward (Wilton, 2011 21). There are several aspects that we need to consider in the recruitment and selection process. For instance we should avoid self-bias that where we equate the applicant to ourselves as this may not be relevant to the post and with the ever dynamic business environment what was need five years ago has now changed and new ideas and technology is needed. HRM must ensure that early bias about mythical issues is eliminated at these critical stages some panelist have bias on people suitability and during recruitment and selection their main concern is not to get an applicant skills but to confirm their unsuitability through the reflection they have on information bias. Stereotyping if adopted during these two stages may lead to wrong choices. Stereotypes may contain some truths but can also be false all together and each individual is unique, different from others. There inaccurate perception can pose a great danger if the HRM does not look for ways to overcome them. Recruitment method should be able to produce appropriate candidates suitable for the job description and a reasonable cost. Individuals who are qualified but the company cannot handle their wage bill makes it remain less competitive since it cannot invest in other area of the organization except meeting the wage bill. Methods like using recruitment agency can be cost effective as the company only gets the final list to choose the candidates from. The choice of the method also is dependent on the position to be filled and agency to fill it. The last stage in recruitment and selection is the actual decision on the candidate’s t offer employment. It includes selecting the best from the shortlisted group. Fairness should be applied even to those who are to going to be taken up for the job. Discrimination is a hindrance in terms of race, gender or nationality. The method chosen here should be one that show some credibility as this gives all applicants equal grounds to compete. HRM should ensure that individuals hired are of high performance. Diversity Diversity refers to a situation in an organization where different people regardless of their age, religion, disability, gender and race are recruited on basis of merit. The goal of HRM in ensuring that there is diversity within an organization is to have talents that are diverse. Different people have different skills and cultures and this help to build a company. Diversity ensures that other capabilities and new knowledge and experiences come up thus an organization become well placed than its competitor if they embrace it. Diversity can be adopted through different approaches such as posting jobs on different platforms for different people to apply for the same for instance advertisement can be through websites or newspapers. It enhances greater creativity as well as a bigger customer base. Diversity should be spread vertically and even horizontally to avoid clustering (Cowling & Mailer, 2013 p.16). Appreciation of diversity should be appreciated through social events where different employees meet with one another. Diversity ensures that the organization has talents from all areas, increasing new ideas as well as creativity. Diversity ensures that even the disabled who pose the required skills are put on board. Having individuals from different religion and culture also contribute to the organization positively such that all people are able to identify themselves with the organization. Different groups usually offer to the organization different skills that improve an organization delivery of services as well as sustain competitive advantage. Diversity enhances the organization reputation to the outer world and improves their image with all stakeholders as well as promotes social cohesion. The wide talent base that results from diversity helps to improve flexibility of employee as well as their responsiveness to tasks (Bell, 2011 p.41). Having different culture promotes creativity and enables innovation of how to operate for example in different cultures and there is likelihood to see new markets as well as opportunities and also be able to exploit them. Diversity in an organization can also be achieved by ensuring that they develop new products in the market, launch and enroll new services as this ensures they increase their customer base. Ensuring that the organization remains competitive, hiring of individuals of different age bracket to ensure they remain relevant and that they are not edge out in term of technology for instance hiring fresh college graduate they may have no experience but have many new ideas combined with experience from the other colleagues these ideas flourish and help to improve the organization. Diversity in gender ensures that no group is dominant and this helps to achieve gender parity. Conclusions After ensuring appropriates measures are followed for ensuring diversity in the workforce good responsibility should be observed on how the diversity is contributing for the benefit of the organization .Diversity ensure that different ideas and views are explored. Policies should be put in place to ensure that diversity is for the benefit of the organization’s successful recruitment is dependent on ability to get the right people with right expertise, skills and knowledge. Research has shown that diverse workforce in an organization uses the different experiences, skills, ideas and perspective to the benefit of the company in an inclusive environment. The positive contribution and values aims to bring positive benefit to the organization. Retaining the workforce is also dependent on how effective HRM is. Since recruitment and selection is lengthy and costly proper measures should be laid down to minimize employee’s turnover. The impression employees have is created by the human resource management practices hence for an organization to be successful, an effective HRM should be established. HRM ensures equal and improvement in treatment of employees and satisfaction. It ensures that there is compliance of all laws related to employment. Training of employees helps improve efficiency in work and adoption of new technologies is made easier. It also ensures that overall strengthening and building of an excellent and quality product in customer service. References Bell, Myrtle P., 2011, Diversity in Organization, Monson: Cengage Learning. Cowling, A. & Mailer, C, 2013, Managing Human Resources: Third Edition, London, NW: Hodder headline Group. Wilton, N. 2011, An Introduction to Human Resource Management, London: Sage Publications Limited Read More