Recruitment and Selection - Essay Example

Competency Based Selection: Recruitment and Selection Over the past two decades the world has experienced sudden change in technology, which has not only revolutionized the way we live our lives but has also completely changed the global economy. Thus organizations have been forced to adapt to the dramatic change in technology and the way they source and recruit their employees. This has not only increased expectations for individual performance but has demanded new attention to the complicated set of personal skills and capacity.

Employees and organizations are therefore experiencing immense pressures emanating from increasing global integration-economic,social,cultural and political.Adavancement in technology has led to new methods of work organization, new ways of service delivery and an increased reliance on temporary employment have changed the way organizations offer services. To face and overcome all these challenges requires a special mixture of specialized knowledge, skills, attitudes and effective resource mobilization and development policies and strategies to nurture and retain these competencies.

Thus organizations ought to be properly prepared to recruit their staff based on their competency, and by so doing they will be selecting and later developing employees meeting the right standards of performance needed not only for present but also for future business success. This particular paper seeks to analyze the process of hiring employees based on their competencies and the overall effect of this in human resource management. Keywords: Human resource management, competency management A profile for success in an organization can be spelled out by such organizational competencies as innovation management, cost management; business partnerships and value added customer service.

Once put in place competencies can actually provide the base for an integrated approach to management performance. So what actually are competencies? Competencies can be said to be skills, capabilities, attitudes and knowledge that constitute excellent performance within a specified context. They therefore become benchmarks of success that support an organization’s mission, vision, strategies and goals and are geared on adding significant business and customer value. Human resource practitioners have long recognized that, knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) are an important element of success in job and historically have been the primary basis in selecting and developing efforts.

Lately, however it has been discovered that individual traits and attitudes such as cooperation, initiative and adaptability also affect performance. Much importance is attached to the so called emotional intelligence. Such traits as zeal, self-awareness, persistence, empathy and social deftness are so vital in life and also in the workplace. Research has proved that personal capabilities, thinking critically, reflective judgment, and learning from past experience are also vital aspects of performance excellence.

Things like personal change and coping are increasingly becoming very significant as the workplace grows more fluid and complex. One of the most important assets of a potential new employee nowadays is attitude. Types of competencies Successful competency-based strategies for selecting and developing employees usually have several points of focus. The four main types of competency that when combined can effectively leverage team, individual and organizational performance include; leadership and management, team-for groups that are interdependent and project-focused and functional.

The human resource management framework focusing on competency will be the foundation of every human resource duties and acts as the link between the performance of an individual and the results achieved in business. Competency based people strategy will have a competency framework which will focus on recruitment and selection of potential candidates, training, performance, reward and finally career management. Thus a business entity that focuses on competency based people strategy will definitely achieve good business results.

A study done by the Division of Human Resources at the University of Southern Maine (USM) to identify the job responsibilities and competencies needed for effective performance. They came up with ten steps for hiring and selecting process. These are as follows; 1. Develop a detailed job description. 2. Affrirmative recruitment for establishment of a pool of qualified candidates. 3. Do a paper screen of the applications made for minimum preferred qualifications. 4. Contact candidates via telephone to provide more information. 5. Candidates to prepare a portfolio of incidents for discussion at interview. 6. Conduct an assessment interview, use incidents in portfolio. 7. Telephone a reference check. 8. Candidates to do a job sample review. 9. Do a physical demands test which is job-related. 10. The new employee to undergo a probation period of six months.

Thus it was really easy to select a few candidates who had the required qualifications, who were later subjected to other interviews and tests, using the above steps than on relying on the traditional staffing method. Thus after the rigorous recruitment process, candidates whose competencies matched those of the applied jobs are more likely to be hired. Clearly, competency is riding higher than qualifications. In fact the modern day changes in human resource management have increased the need for responsiveness from the employees, as opposed to the traditional policies in management of employees.

In the traditional qualification based hiring, human resource managers looked at mostly the qualifications which basically meant what you had, but competency looks at how you can effectively carry out the assigned duties. Traditional job analysis focuses on elements of the jobs and classifies the job in series of tasks required to execute the job, whereas competency focuses on the staff that perform the job well and defines the job according to behaviors and character traits of these people. In conclusion we can say that competency generally focuses on the knowledge, skills, job attitude, observable behavior and job performance.

Competency based way of recruitment is more holistic than the traditional method of staffing organization. It thus provides a direct and clear foundation for talks to take place between a manager and the staff’s performance, development and career-related issues. References Heneman G. Herbert, J. A.-M. (2012). Staffing Organizations. New York: McGraw-Hill Irwin.