Complete strategic plan
for hiring and training
new employees

Hiring

Human Resources (HR) Planning

A company must start the hiring process with HR planning by anticipating future projects, business demands and internal organizational aims, involving production levels, marketing efforts, technological expansions and any other goals. This step will require the involvement of all company managers and executives in an attempt to delineate the functions that need to be addressed and identify the results needed to make the company successful (Pinsker, pg. 21).

Once demand conditions are determined, the organization must derive its personnel requirements using the following strategies:

  • create exact performance expectations that indicate the specific results expected from the position, from which a manger can develop the success patterns and personal characteristics needed to fulfill the job
  • become aware of the success patterns of the department and the organization by observing the experiences, accomplishments and skills of existing employees, including educational, technical and social, that have proved beneficial to the company
  • compare the skills of valuable and successful employees to the skills of unsuccessful ones in order to determine if certain experiences and abilities are closely linked to employee success
  • perform incumbent interviews in order to learn from one's own employees what their key responsibilities are, the types of problems they address, the interactions and difficulties they have, as well as the skills and abilities they feel are necessary to perform their duties

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Selection Policies

Once a company is aware of exactly what it needs and what it is looking for, it must utilize a systematic approach in order to match applicants to the initial profiles. The most effective model states that in order to determine the most relevant and reliable forecasts of job performance effectiveness, a manager must develop types of job performance measures. These measures are also known as predictors (eg. educational attainment, grades and the length of previous employment) which can be viewed as information supporting the probability that an employee will be successful at a particular task. These predictors are valid differentiators of candidates as well as indicators of skill, knowledge and individuals characteristics.

The actual measures of job performance effectiveness are referred to as criteria and they are standards on which judgments and decisions can be based, such as good communication skills, extensive technical knowledge, leadership abilities, etc. The criteria should be based on the job analysis performed in the HR planning stage.

Job-success prediction is only possible when a systematic relationship can be established over time between predictor and criterion, and the stronger the relationship, the more accurate the predictions (Cascio and Awad, pg. 245) given the following rules are abided by:

  • criterion status has to be measured later on in time, after individuals have already been hired
  • if an employee's performance in a certain area is effective, then it can temporarily be assumed that the predictors for that criterion were valid
  • criterion validity can be strengthened every time the same predictors lead to the desired level of job performance effectiveness, and equally weakened when the results are not met
  • the validity of predictors must be rechecked periodically thereafter, until it no longer relates to job performance criterion
  • in the case where strategies have not produced good employment matches in the past, they are discarded while new ones are sought
  • at any given time, a company must "incorporate only the hiring policies and programs that have been demonstrated to be beneficial to hiring outcomes" (Koch, pg. 22)

Established predictors can be effectively used in subsequent hiring efforts, where a manager can rely on proven indicators in order to ensure successful evaluation and selection. This stage is therefore a continuous cycle of analysis and feedback, where current decisions can be safely based on past results.

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Traditional screening and hiring models

Traditional hiring models are paper-based models, where HR professionals have to manually view and discuss skills and abilities presented on candidates' resumes. These models are usually multi-staged.

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Automated Screening and Hiring Tools

  • Automation helps human resource professional save the time they spend routine administrative duties so their talent can be used on designing strategic direction to the company.
  • Automation reduces operating costs.
    For example, with a single mouse click, Web-based hiring processes could launch a job requisition, and approved positions are then posted to various job posting sites for recruiting purposes. Applications can be screened and tracked seamlessly through the company's Website so that hiring administrators can focus on a larger group of qualified applicants.
  • Automation allows HR professionals easily keep track of candidates once their information is input to the company's HR Information System (HRIS).
    For example, Research In Motion (RIM), which is a leading designer, manufacturer and marketer of innovative wireless solutions for the worldwide mobile communications market, requires candidates to submit their resumes through the company's web application process. Once submitted, candidates' data is electronically integrated into company's HRIS. If new job postings are available, the AHS scans through each applicant's skill set, and selects qualified applicants to send emails about the new opportunity.

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Case Study

The problem:

United States Federal Agencies (USFA) sent out a survey in year 2003 to identify some of the issues related to their recruitment system. The result of the survey clearly stated that there existed a drastic need to re-frame the way the federal agencies recruit and advertise jobs. Many applicants complained that the existing screening stage took too long to process. Recruiters also claimed that because manually screening excessive volume of applications was time-consuming and inefficient, good candidates were usually hired away by private industries even before Federal agencies sent them responses.

The Solution:

In order to enforce the efficiency of hiring system of USFA, recruiting managers were looking to information technology to help them in this endeavor and decided upon using AHS to announce jobs, receive applications, and identify promising candidates.

Discussion:

  1. Advantages
    The new AHS features the ability of "federalizing" recruiting process by performing the following actions on incoming applications:
    • Examine basic legal and professional standards to be considered for Federal employment
    • Judging applications for consideration based on special factors such as career rotation programs and location preference
    • Evaluating applicants and make distinctions among them
    • When refer to a recruiting officer, listing qualified applicants in proper order and groups
    • Maintain unselected applications in database for the purpose of informing applicants about future hiring possibilities
  2. Disadvantages
    • Agencies suggested that although the AHS helps screening applications much more quickly, these applications' initial evaluations of experience and education must be supplemented by human judgments to ensure fairness and completeness of the screening process.
    • Some agencies are concerned that automation may cause excessive information requirements that adds burden to applicants who seek competitive offers with little effort.
    • Automation can certainly reduce the potential for human errors and overt discrimination, but it could introduce the possibility that applicants' unintentional misrepresentation of their qualifications will be unobserved and uncorrected.
  3. Recommendations
    • Agencies need to develop algorithms to delete outdated applications on a regular basis to keep database size in control.
    • Since AHS requires familiarity with using computer systems, some agencies may need to train existing HR officers to learn about computer technologies, and increase information security control so that employees do not abuse the computer systems at work.
    • Another issue is the aging of the content of the AHS. Jobs requirements, terminologies, technologies are never static elements and hence need to be updated constantly.
    • Agencies may need to assign positions to be mainly responsible for updating these contents for AHS.

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