Employee resourcing, talent management, HRD and the skills agenda - Essay Example

Employee resourcing, talent management, HRD and the skills agenda 8-2 The news story Cloud computing and social media are becoming the new trend of internet information sharing both in personal lives and business integration. CMSwire.com, a popular business web magazine on customer experience management, digital marketing, social business and enterprise information management that mainly targets technology buyers, vendors and enterprise collaboration readership, published a detailed news story on February 4, 2013 signifying cloud computing and social media influence on talent management. Entitled “Report: Talent Management in Age of Cloud and Social Media”, the report gives statistics of employees trending to use social networks at work; giving information on those using it for business purposes only and those blocked or monitored from the usage by the employers. Furthermore, it analyses how businesses could be and have been making use of this trend to their favor, basing on the results of the Silk Road report "The State of Talent Management 2013". This report shares surveys and insights to help managements’ leverage human resources as a valuable asset and gives contextual analysis to the information age human resource professionals’ mindsets and capabilities. The news report evaluates the results of this survey in context to manual versus automated systems and how their skills are being used. The inefficiencies and lagging behind of employees has been attributed to the manual system on par with even the in house developed automated methodologies which avoid duplications and inaccuracies saving extra effort. Cloud computing, basically an IT tool, is said to have been more in use by the human resource departments than IT departments. This is because it allows managing employees globally and also enables self management for the employees reducing load on the administration and making full use of the employee skills when used with correct setup. Such tactics spring the need for employee engagement programs which are termed as custom designed workforce retaining methodologies to increase loyalties and job satisfaction. The trend of companies allowing and encouraging personal devices, like smart phones, is marked in the report as one of such tactics which saves the company any expenditure on the devices and gets them the benefit of better networking their employees with each other, the business and the customers. Disruption and remaking of the workforce has been reported to be a continuous blending process with direct effect on employee motivation. The emphasis on the usage of employees’ social media skills is implied to drive the demand for temporary staff around the globe. Managing a virtual workforce and managing the permanent employees virtual is described as a blurring difference. Evaluative analysis of the HRM implications Advance of networking and information technology’s capability to manage resources over a network gives the opportunity for resource optimization. Why use a separate printer with each computer when a single printer could be used over the network for the whole floor? Such sharing of resources has been proven useful and further taken a step into the world wide web. Where sharing printers over a local area network could reduce the need for more hardware, the same concept when applied to the internet not only reduces the need for hardware resources but also human resources. Multiple workforces are not required any more to work at multiple locations. The same workforce can virtually work over the internet using cloud computing, share resources, collaborate and be flexible enough to work over the internet infrastructure (Akass, 2008). The virtually omnipresent workforce is an ideal for the businesses to expand and develop in the global market and make the best of more than just their local customers. Social media on the other hand has mostly integrated into most internet users’ personal lives. Content and information sharing has taken a new shape where each individual can directly broadcast to his whole social circle over the internet. Businesses targeting this type of internet audience develop a whole new set of marketing strategies which involve content sharing giving the customers something to share about the business to their social circles. This implies the advent of social media has morphed business marketing. This directly influences the human resources as well. Where marketing is being morphed by the era of sharing and collaboration, human resource management is also being driven in to networked employees that directly share business related information with each other. Such professional networks make it possible for the human resource developers and managements to search for, hire, and evaluate employees over the internet as well as establish continuous professional communications to directly manage them over the internet. This allows degree of freedom to the employees giving them the space to manage themselves and takes this load off the company; essentially being workforce empowering and power delegation (Telecommunications Weekly, 2009). The industries, to compete with the ever expanding businesses and to cater for the ever expanding market, change and improve continuously. Human resourcing in such conditions is, at best, a task for those who understand personalities and roles in field specific tasks and can find such people efficiently. This requires human resource teams to be a balanced mixture of technical and HR background recruiters (Hung, 2009). Resourcing has been said to be treated with a lower priority by human resource professionals for a variety of reasons. Staffing the organization in the first place, being the basic necessity, should not be treated as a forgotten relative of the HR family. When applied together with social networking and global management of resources, it has gained even more importance over time (Resourcing, 2008). Human resource management by the use of internet, mainly social media, is not only limited to saving time and money for the core administration but also aimed for communication improvement. This real time information updating has enabled businesses, for example banks, to avail benefits which were not even known to them before. The word of mouth, when traveling in real time, can be an indispensable tool for human resource organization and optimization (Ball, 2002). Talent management mostly emphasizing on identifying the workforce with highest performance, identifying people with high potential and further developing them with strategies like campus recruitment and organizing the rightly talented people into the right areas of work is essential to improve business performance. Social media provides the opportunity to categorize and profile entrepreneurial workers, cultural & de-individualized workers and disciplined workers separately to place them according to their talents (Jackson et. al., 2009). This type of talent management’s effect on the chosen employees’ commercial judgment, inspirational leadership qualities and customer drive can be the basic driving force for the business towards its desired benchmarks and goals. Job streaming discussion posts on social networks like Facebook and twitter tend to bring specialized professionals to a single forum providing the human resource managers the opportunity to have actually emphasize on level of required talent instead of losing the focus on choosing the right qualifications (Koster, 2009). Precedent to the above example, recruiting the desired talent for the company was, since long, achieved by visiting university campuses and achieving so that the HR staff could work on sorting out the high potential people and spend less time on choosing the right qualifications and professional degrees. The social media has enabled the recruiters to do this on a larger scale. Professional network websites like linkedin.com provide the businesses to search for the right professionals and target their dedicated online university portals or university groups on the social networks (Srivastava, 2012; Bulmer, Dimauro, 2010). Serendipity does not place high talent employees in your organization. The recruitment cycle demands strategy and a training backbone of the human resource professionals carrying out the task (Mint, 2011). Where social networks have provided access to swarms of fresh talent to hire, cloud computing has provided the facility to carry out this tedious task with ease. Online surveys and questionnaires along with employee psychological and academic evaluation techniques help the human resource professionals shortlist best of the professionals exactly matching the company’s needs and then to interview them personally on an acceptable scale. Companies that fail to recognize that the kind of staff they will need not only on the current hiring but also down the line get boomeranged with their blunders. Networking the current and former employees through social networks eliminates chances of having an impatient workforce that might think their job is a waste of time. Like a university’s alumni have influence over the freshmen decision making, a company’s former workforce could give the same type of guidance and motivation to the freshly hired employees. Social media entertains and facilitates these possibilities to a whole new extent (Mint, 2011). Human resource development on par with rest of the human resource management focuses more on the current workforce. In the contemporary economy, where technology is so rapid that skills are defined as of ‘changing nature’, continuous HRD is a necessity (Mclagan, 1996). Keeping an up to date workforce in terms of work progress through social media was previously discussed as a part of HRM techniques, keeping them up to date technologically and skill wise as another off shoot advantage of the same concept. Human resource development sometimes gives a combination of hopes with life-giving forecasts and promising opportunities to the employees which provide them with the possibility of enhancing their on-job academic careers. This gives them a sense of long term responsibility towards the business they are working for. Introducing new technology and subsequent training to keep up with the 21st century, whole layers of management and autocratic processes and formalities are eliminated when shifting to the new technology, continuously evolving and not letting the status quo let your workforce dynamics be stagnant for more than a short while (Mclagan, 1996; Heinz, 2012). When dealing with the already hired staff, human resource development gets a boost by the interactive social media environment which gives the employees a real time feel to discuss and complete their tasks or improve their skills in general (Koster, 2009). This interactive environment facilitated by cloud computing facilities brings together a multi-talented workforce from over different locations reducing traveling costs and time. Skill sharing in such an environment is a supplement. Employees working over a cloud setup over a combined task are essentially bring their own expertise to the table while letting the rest of the work be handled by those who have appropriate skills (Computer News Middle East, 2011). Improving the workforce skills based on a skills agenda is beneficial for both the employee and the employer and further increases long term employee loyalty due to career enhancement discussed previously. The skill and qualification levels being symmetric with the employment rate are one of the main factors for this. Issue of skills agenda is being globally addressed by businesses to make their employees fully participate in development. This makes it an essential part of human resource development. Companies are introducing hierarchies based on skill sets which is more practical and sensible so that the people with appropriate skills take the lead positions instead of mere managers filling in the rolls of telling people what to do (Canadian Speeches, 2002). This somehow relates with the larger concept of technocracy. Analysing the advantage human resource managements get from the social media to the depth will show that on one hand some specially designed professional networks might help the recruiters, other social networks like facebook which are more tailored for personal lives, might actually make it difficult for the employers to figure out the blurred differences between professional and personal personas of individuals (Koster, 2009). Social media and public relations have now a blurred overlap which results in companies holding annual contests for promotion and hiring on the same platform. Social media hosted events or events promoted through social media and hosted at multiple locations can bring in new talents that can showcase creative skills and such highlighting of the event itself being a promotional advantage for the business. The events can hone the skills of the current employees and the submissions, data and information gathered or collected from the participants, whether or not they are eventually hired, can be used by the company as a first hand resource for their own human resource development either by direct exposure or basing further trainings on the information (Entertainment Close-up 2012). The systematic training that social media interaction of employees and cloud based work environment provide; personal experience, job satisfaction and the professional interaction with the skilled workforce directly in control of the work at hand, is a useful human resource development tool essential to keep up with the information age. The direct interaction with the leadership over cloud based system or a social media forum setup to discuss a work specific task makes it less monotonous for the employees and makes problem solving interesting as the actual go-to people are readily available. Troubleshooting and researching on the on hand tasks can safely be concluded to be much quicker in this setup. The implications of social media’s integration with professional lives of individuals and a business’s capability to adapt to it, dictates how the business operates over the ever changing market and human resource needs. When the real life implications of talent management, recruiting and human resource development overlap, facilities like cloud computing and social media actualize them into more manageable setups with more practical approaches instead of redundant autocratic processes. The formal trainings and procedures on the other hand remain unaffected by this in general and are only facilitated on the managers’ discretion. An online training, if felt required by the manager can be setup, employees informed in the real time over the social networks and the training delivered over shared resources of cloud computing and the use of webinars makes the this the new world order for expanding businesses. References "Improving Talent Management Through Social Networks."Telecommunications Weekly. NewsRX. 2009. Retrieved February 08, 2013 from HighBeam Research:http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-203021452.html HUNG , ISABELLE. "THE TOPIC: Can resourcing professional work across any business sector." Resourcing. Centaur Communications Ltd. 2009. Retrieved February 08, 2013 from HighBeam Research:http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-193823888.html "Time to stop treating resourcing as the poor relation of HR." Resourcing. Centaur Communications Ltd. 2008. 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