Human Resource Management - Strategic Approach to Employment - Essay Example

HRM Case Study on "You Never Know" and Section # of HRM Case Study on "You Never Know" Q1. People applying for jobs are always motivated to display themselves in the best light, and as a result, this can sometimes lead to inaccurate portrayals of abilities, skills, experiences, and personality. Based upon what you have read in this chapter, how should you approach a job applicants written application and resume if your goal is to make sure that they accurately reflect the persons past experiences and accomplishments? A deep rooted problem in the business world is that situations can be very ruthless and downright unfair most of the time. It usually doesn’t give second chances to people. Many deserving people are fighting to get a basic job which will at least pay their mortgage and on the other hand, people who cannot even read properly, let alone develop strategies for a company, get great jobs. Why is this? It all boils down to the resume. If someone has carefully crafted their resume by making even their simplest and easiest tasks show up as if they have climbed Mount Everest, it is obvious that it will impress the company. On the other hand, there are also those who are so gullible that they will not show up their most important experiences clearly so that they become overshadowed in the resume and don’t earn them as much credit as they deserve. The fault can also be ascribed to companies for not being thorough in their selection. More often than not they may drop a very worthy candidate’s resume in the bin just because the font was not right or his English Language might be a little weak. I personally know a case from “Reckitt & Benkiser” who rejected a girl candidate for their Management Trainee program because her father was a retired employee of “Unilever”. They might have had this assumption that she will pass on secrets to a rival company. Everyone does not make their own resume. As a business student I know that there might be a handful students who “really” know how to do this job well and everyone will come up to them to get their resume made. Either this, or there may be people who hire professional help to get their resumes made. This practice happens in abundance because companies look for, and hire, only those candidates who have a snappy line in their resume which will catch the eyes of the company. Writing a goal has never been tougher. Simply writing “to get a good job in a multinational company to make a career” is never enough. You have to write “explore my horizons in the prestigious working environment this company offers and make my time in this society a more useful contribution than the next person”, which technically means the same thing. This dissolves the self confidence and character of the more suitable candidate and he has no other choice than to hire professional help to make his resume. To make sure that the approach to a job applicants written application and resume is accurate and reflects the candidate’s past experiences and accomplishments truthfully, verifications are required. Verify everything. From the candidate’s parents names to their previous job description and even their relationship status. Even if a single thing doesn’t match, or there is something missing in their story, then you have definite proof that the rest of the information they have provided might not be accurate either and having such a candidate working for your company might lead them to do that same thing during their job as well. If the candidate is not lying or concealing anything by cover up stories then everything will check out. If in doubt of anything, you can always call the candidate up and confirm if they have not made an honest mistake. Making it a company policy might help a lot that if anyone is found guilty of misrepresentation (Noe, 1996). By reading this policy, candidates who really are planning such an act will either withdraw or present accurate information. Q2. In the face-to-face interview process, what steps can be taken to ensure that the applicant is being frank and honest with you, and what steps should you take if you feel that he or she is portraying an inaccurate picture of himself or herself? Having face to face interviews is probably the best way to determine who is being honest without looking or verifying the candidate’s history. The human being is designed in such a way and more importantly they are brought up in an environment that whenever they are doing something against their conscience, no matter if they are doing it willingly or unwillingly, it will show up in one way or another in their body language. Observing the candidate’s body language and filtering normal nervous behavior from suspicious behavior is no easy task though. The trick is to look for isolated clues. Look at their eyes while they answer. Most people involuntarily avoid gazing directly at the person they are lying to (Hendry, 1995). Spontaneous answers are great no doubt, but there is a slight difference which shows if these answers aren’t learnt by heart. Cross questioning might reveal some hesitation as they might try to recalculate their real story to the cover story. This might not be true in all cases as a genuine case might also falter, but you might want to run a check on that particular information just in case before confirmation. In case the information does not match to what they have written or in some odd cases, the information they are telling you is quite different from what they wrote in their resume, you can always ask them about it. Another way might be to continue with the interview and see how many more mistakes they make. Then collectively check and verify all suspicious things to come up with a solid conclusion. Doing a background check after screening resumes is advisable. It will not only save you precious interviewing time but will also make you come up with a solid argument against the person if he decides to contest your decision. One of the most crucial things to keep in mind is not to rush in selecting your employees. When selecting someone to be a part of your company and evaluating who will prove to be a better asset is something which should be done with a calm mind and with proper stats and evaluating criterion. Also, verifying everything, as discussed in the last answer, is the best way to avoid any judgment errors. This can only happen if you have time and don’t need to show your increased performance at the cost of the company. Q3. Beyond the traditional approaches of going over the application and conducting face-to-face interviews, what other steps can you as an employer take to ensure that the person who is being hired for the job has the right abilities, skills, past experiences and personality? There is a reason why the traditional ways of selecting employees became traditional in the first place. It is because they work. There is no other substitute in the real world when you have to filter out thousands of resumes in a limited period of time to pick out worthy employees or pay the consequences if you have made a mistake. The only person to be blamed if something goes wrong is the person who hired the now unfit-for-the-company employee. To make sure that you do not make such a mistake, you have to think out of the box to find out information about the candidate. The best source of this information is the candidate’s previous employer. They will have the best idea of how the candidate performs at his job and if you can get them to cooperate enough with you by asking them to reveal the responsibilities the candidate was given and to what extent was the candidate able to fulfill them, it will prove to be an extremely valuable source of information for you. This is going to be hard because most companies will not give out any personal information of any of their existing or pervious employees officially. Therefore, the company might want to find an unofficial connection with the previous employer for this sole purpose. Another approach which is very popular is hiring employees on a temporary basis. Do not make them permanent immediately. This means that the candidate will be performing his duties as he will be on his permanent job but not being permanent on the payroll and it will not be too difficult to dismiss him if he doesn’t rise to the expectations. This will help keep the candidates on their toes the whole time and will show the company the true potential of the candidate to assess their productivity for future. Having second or third interviews also proves to be very valuable. This is not a traditional face to face interview. You can put the candidate in a number of different situations to assess them on the spot of how they will react and what will they do to control the situation. How will they play their required part and what do they think their responsibilities are in a given situation. Asking for detailed replies to such questions will act as a simulation exercise for the candidates. Not having prepared too much on these types of questions, the candidates can be judged on their attitude towards work and performance under stress. The more recent approach of companies to check, and even keep tabs on, new and existing employees is to scrutinize their “Orkut” or “Facebook” profiles. Keeping regular tabs has recently resulted in the firing of many different employees when they made excuses not to come to work by saying that they are not feeling well while actually they had to go to a party (Noe et al., 2008). The company only found out about this when they saw pictures of the person partying on the time that they were reported to be ill. It must be admitted that not all ways are fool proof. But this doesn’t mean that one should start exploiting the candidate and scare him to the limit and make him think that the company is more trouble than it’s worth. The point is to make sure that you have covered all possible doors of exploitation towards you, while keeping the prospective employee satisfied. Once you can find and successfully incorporate this delicate balance in your hiring procedures, then you can be assured of having the best possible candidates as your employees. References Hendry, Chris (1995) Human Resource Management: A Strategic Approach to Employment. Butterworth-Heinemann publishing Noe, Hollenbeck, Gerhart, Wright (2008) Human Resource Management: Gaining a Competitive Edge. Irwin/McGraw-Hill publishing Noe, Raymond A. (1996) Human Resource Management. Irwin publishers   Read More