Human resources 

is a term used to describe the individuals who make up the workforce of

an organization, although it is also applied in labor economics to, for example, business
sectors or even whole nations. Human resources is also the name of the function within an
organization charged with the overall responsibility for implementing strategies and policies
relating to the management of individuals (i.e. the human resources). This function title is
often abbreviated to the initials "HR".

Human resources is a relatively modern management term, coined as early as the 1960s -
when humanity took a shift as human rights came to a brighter light during the Vietnam
Era. The origins of the function arose in organizations that introduced 'welfare management'
practices and also in those that adopted the principles of 'scientific management'. From
these terms emerged a largely administrative management activity, coordinating a range of
worker related processes and becoming known, in time, as the 'personnel function'. Human
resources progressively became the more usual name for this function, in the first instance
in the United States as well as multinational or international corporations, reflecting the
adoption of a more quantitative as well as strategic approach to workforce management,
demanded by corporate management to gain a competitive advantage, utilizing limited
skilled and highly skilled workers.

Human resources purpose and role

In simple terms, an organization's human resource management strategy should
maximize return on investment in the organization's human capital and minimize
financial risk.
Human resource managers seek to achieve this by aligning the supply of skilled and
qualified individuals and the capabilities of the current workforce, with the
organization's ongoing and future business plans and requirements to maximize
return on investment and secure future survival and success.
In ensuring such objectives are achieved, the human resource function is to
implement an organization's human resource requirements effectively, taking into
account federal, state and local labor laws and regulations; ethical business
practices; and net cost, in a manner that maximizes, as far as possible, employee
motivation, commitment and productivity.

Key functions

Human Resources may set strategies and develop policies, standards, systems, and processes that
implement these strategies in a whole range of areas. The following are typical of a wide range of
organizations:

 Maintaining awareness of and compliance with local, state and federal labor laws
(Department of Labor federal labor law information)
 Recruitment, selection, and on boarding (resourcing)
 Employee recordkeeping and confidentiality
 Organizational design and development
 Business transformation  and change management
 Performance, conduct and behavior management
 Industrial and employee relations
 Human resources (workforce) analysis and workforce personnel data management
 Compensation and employee benefit  management
 Training and development (learning management)
 Employee motivation and morale-building (employee retention and loyalty)

Implementation of such policies, processes or standards may be directly managed by the HR function
itself, or the function may indirectly supervise the implementation of such activities by managers, other
business functions or via third-party external partner organizations. Applicable legal issues, such as
the potential for disparate treatment and disparate impact, are also extremely important to HR
managers.

Human resources management trends and influences

In organizations, it is important to determine both current and future organizational

requirements for both core employees and the contingent workforce in terms of their
skills/technical abilities, competencies, flexibility etc. The analysis requires
consideration of the internal and external factors that can have an effect on
the resourcing, development, motivation and retention of employees and other
workers.

External factors are those largely outside the control of the organization. These
include issues such as economic climate and current and future labor market trends
(e.g., skills, education level, government investment into industries etc.). On the
other hand, internal influences are broadly controlled by the organization to predict,
determine, and monitor—for example—the organizational culture, underpinned by
management style, environmental climate, and the approach to ethical and corporate
social responsibilities.
Major trends

To know the business environment an organization operates in, three major trends must be
considered:

1. Demographics: the characteristics of a population/workforce, for example, age,

gender or social class. This type of trend may have an effect in relation to pension
offerings, insurance packages etc.
2. Diversity: the variation within the population/workplace. Changes in society now
mean that a larger proportion of organizations are made up of "baby-boomers" or
older employees in comparison to thirty years ago. Advocates of "workplace
diversity" simply advocate an employee base that is a mirror reflection of the make-
up of society insofar as race, gender, sexual orientation etc.
3. Skills and qualifications: as industries move from manual to more managerial
professions so does the need for more highly skilled graduates. If the market is
"tight" (i.e. not enough staff for the jobs), employers must compete for employees by
offering financial rewards, community investment, etc.

Individual responses

In regard to how individuals respond to the changes in a labor market, the following must be
understood:

 Geographical spread: how far is the job from the individual? The distance to travel to
work should be in line with the pay offered, and the transportation and infrastructure of
the area also influence who applies for a post.
 Occupational structure: the norms and values of the different careers within an
organization. Mahoney 1989 developed 3 different types of occupational structure,
namely, craft (loyalty to the profession), organization career (promotion through the firm)
and unstructured (lower/unskilled workers who work when needed).
 Generational difference: different age categories of employees have certain
characteristics, for example, their behavior and their expectations of the organization.

Framework

Human Resources Development is a framework for the expansion of human capital

within an organization or (in new approaches) a municipality, region, or nation.
Human Resources Development is a combination of training and education, in a
broad context of adequate health and employment policies, that ensures the
continual improvement and growth of both the individual, the organization, and the
national human resourcefulness. Adam Smith states, “The capacities of individuals
depended on their access to education”.Human Resources Development is the
medium that drives the process between training and learning in a broadly fostering
environment. Human Resources Development is not a defined object, but a series of
organised processes, “with a specific learning objective”  Within a national context, it
becomes a strategic approach to inter sectoral linkages between health, education
and employment.

Structure

Human Resources Development is the structure that allows for individual

development, potentially satisfying the organization's, or the nation's goals.
Development of the individual benefits the individual, the organization—and the
nation and its citizens. In the corporate vision, the Human Resources Development
framework views employees as an asset to the enterprise, whose value is enhanced
by development, "Its primary focus is on growth and employee development…it
emphasizes developing individual potential and skills" (Elwood, Olton and Trott
1996) Human Resources Development in this treatment can be in-room group
training, tertiary or vocational courses or mentoring and coaching by senior
employees with the aim for a desired outcome that develops the individual's
performance. At the level of a national strategy, it can be a broad inter-sectoral
approach to fostering creative contributions to national productivity.

Training and development

At the organizational level, a successful Human Resources Development program

prepares the individual to undertake a higher level of work, "organized learning over
a given period of time, to provide the possibility of performance change" (Nadler
1984). In these settings, Human Resources Development is the framework that
focuses on the organization's competencies at the first stage, training, and then
developing the employee, through education, to satisfy the organization's long-term
needs and the individual's career goals and employee value to their present and
future employers. Human Resources Development can be defined simply as
developing the most important section of any business, its human resource, by
attaining or upgrading employee skills and attitudes at all levels to maximize
enterprise effectiveness. The people within an organization are its human resource.
Human Resources Development from a business perspective is not entirely focused
on the individual's growth and development; "development occurs to enhance the
organization's value, not solely for individual improvement. Individual education and
development is a tool and a means to an end, not the end goal itself" (Elwood F.
Holton II, James W. Trott Jr). The broader concept of national and more strategic
attention to the development of human resources is beginning to emerge as newly
independent countries face strong competition for their skilled professionals and the
accompanying brain-drain they experience.

Recruitment and selection

Applicant recruitment and employee selection form a major part of an organization's

overall resourcing strategies, which identify and secure people needed for the
organization to survive and succeed in the short- to medium-term. Recruitment
activities need to be responsive to the increasingly competitive market to secure
suitably qualified and capable recruits at all levels. To be effective, these initiatives
need to include how and when to source the best recruits, internally or externally.
Common to the success of either are: well-defined organizational structures with
sound job design, robust task and person specification and versatile selection
processes, reward, employment relations and human resource policies, underpinned
by a commitment for strong employer branding and employee
engagement and onboarding strategies.

Internal recruitment can provide the most cost-effective source for recruits if the
potential of the existing pool of employees has been enhanced through training,
development and other performance-enhancing activities such as performance
appraisal, succession planning and development centres to review performance and
assess employee development needs and promotional potential.
Increasingly, securing the best quality candidates for almost all organizations relies,
at least occasionally if not substantially, on external recruitment methods. Rapidly
changing business models demand skill and experience that cannot be sourced or
rapidly enough developed from the existing employee base. It would be unusual for
an organization to undertake all aspects of the recruitment process without support
from third-party dedicated recruitment firms. This may involve a range of support
services, such as: provision of CVs or resumes, identifying recruitment media,
advertisement design and media placement for job vacancies, candidate response
handling, shortlisting, conducting aptitude testing, preliminary interviews or reference
and qualification verification. Typically, small organizations may not have in-house
resources or, in common with larger organizations, may not possess the particular
skill-set required to undertake a specific recruitment assignment. Where
requirements arise, these are referred on an ad hoc basis to government job
centres or commercially-run employment agencies.
Except in sectors where high-volume recruitment is the norm, an organization faced
with sudden, unexpected requirements for an unusually large number of new recruits
often delegates the task to a specialist external recruiter. Sourcing executive-level
and senior management as well as the acquisition of scarce or ‘high-potential’
recruits has been a long-established market serviced by a wide range of ‘search and
selection’ or ‘headhunting’ consultancies, which typically form long-standing
relationships with their client organizations. Finally, certain organizations with
sophisticated HR practices have identified a strategic advantage in outsourcing
complete responsibility for all workforce procurement to one or more third-party
recruitment agencies or consultancies. In the most sophisticated of these
arrangements the external recruitment services provider may not only physically
locate, or ‘embed’, their resourcing team(s) in the client organization's offices, but
work in tandem with the senior human resource management team in developing the
longer-term HR resourcing strategy and plan.

Trans-national labor mobility

An important controversy regarding labor mobility illustrates the broader

philosophical issue with usage of the phrase "human resources". Governments of
developing nations often regard developed nations that encourage immigration or
"guest workers" as appropriating human capital that is more rightfully part of the
developing nation and required to further its economic growth.

Over time, the United Nations have come to more generally support the developing
nations' point of view, and have requested significant offsetting "foreign aid"
contributions so that a developing nation losing human capital does not lose the
capacity to continue to train new people in trades, professions, and the arts.

Human resource management (HRM)

It is the strategic and coherent  approach to the management of an organization's

most valued assets - the people working there who individually and collectively
contribute to the achievement of the objectives of the business. The terms "human
resource management" and human resources (HR) have largely replaced the term
"personnel management" as a description of the processes involved in managing
people in organizations. In simple words, HRM means employing people, developing
their capacities, utilizing, maintaining and compensating their services in tune with
the job and organizational requirement.
Its features include:

 Organizational management
 Personnel administration
 Manpower management
 Industrial management

But these traditional expressions are becoming less common for the theoretical
discipline. Sometimes even employee and industrial relations are confusingly
listed as synonyms, although these normally refer to the relationship between
management and workers and the behavior of workers in companies.
The theoretical discipline is based primarily on the assumption that employees are
individuals with varying goals and needs, and as such should not be thought of as
basic business resources, such as trucks and filing cabinets. The field takes a
positive view of workers, assuming that virtually all wish to contribute to the
enterprise productively, and that the main obstacles to their endeavors are lack of
knowledge, insufficient training, and failures of process.

Human Resource Management(HRM) is seen by practitioners in the field as a more

innovative view of workplace management than the traditional approach. Its
techniques force the managers of an enterprise to express their goals with specificity
so that they can be understood and undertaken by the workforce, and to provide the
resources needed for them to successfully accomplish their assignments. As such,
HRM techniques, when properly practiced, are expressive of the goals and operating
practices of the enterprise overall. HRM is also seen by many to have a key role in
risk reduction within organisations.

Synonyms such as personnel management are often used in a more restricted

sense to describe activities that are necessary in the recruiting of a workforce,
providing its members with payroll and benefits, and administrating their work-life
needs. So if we move to actual definitions, Torrington and Hall (1987) define
personnel management as being:

“a series of activities which: first enable working people and their employing
organisations to agree about the objectives and nature of their working relationship
and, secondly, ensures that the agreement is fulfilled"
Academic theory

Research in the area of HRM has much to contribute to the organisational practice of
HRM. For the last 20 years, empirical work has paid particular attention to the link
between the practice of HRM and organisational performance, evident in improved
employee commitment, lower levels of absenteeism and turnover, higher levels of
skills and therefore higher productivity, enhanced quality and efficiency . This area of
work is sometimes referred to as 'Strategic HRM' or SHRM .

Within SHRM three strands of work can be observed: Best practice, Best Fit and the
Resource Based View (RBV).

The notion of best practice - sometimes called 'high commitment' HRM - proposes
that the adoption of certain best practices in HRM will result in better organisational
performance. Perhaps the most popular work in this area is that of Pfeffer  who
argued that there were seven best practices for achieving competitive advantage
through people and 'building profits by putting people first'. These practices included:
providing employment security, selective hiring, extensive training, sharing
information, self-managed teams, high pay based on company performance and the
reduction of status differentials. However, there is a huge number of studies which
provide evidence of best practices, usually implemented in coherent bundles, and
therefore it is difficult to draw generalised conclusions about which is the 'best' way
(For a comparison of different sets of best practices see Becker and Gerhart, 1996.

Best fit, or the contingency approach to HRM, argues that HRM improves
performance where there is a close vertical fit between the HRM practices and the
company's strategy. This link ensures close coherence between the HR people
processes and policies and the external market or business strategy. There are a
range of theories about the nature of this vertical integration. For example, a set of
'lifecycle' models argue that HR policies and practices can be mapped onto the stage
of an organisation's development or lifecycle. Competitive advantage models take
Porter's (1985) ideas about strategic choice and map a range of HR practices onto
the organisation's choice of competitive strategy. Finally 'configurational
models' provide a more sophisticated approach which advocates a close
examination of the organisation's strategy in order to determine the appropriate HR
policies and practices. However, this approach assumes that the strategy of the
organisation can be identified - many organisations exist in a state of flux and
development.

The Resource Based View (RBV), argued by some to be at the foundation of modern
HRM , focusses on the internal resources of the organisation and how they
contribute to competitive advantage. The uniqueness of these resources is preferred
to homogeneity and HRM has a central role in developing human resources that are
valuable, rare, difficult to copy or substitute and that are effectively organised.

Overall, the theory of HRM argues that the goal of human resource management is
to help an organization to meet strategic goals by attracting, and maintaining
employees and also to manage them effectively. The key word here perhaps is "fit",
i.e. a HRM approach seeks to ensure a fit between the management of an
organisation's employees, and the overall strategic direction of the company (Miller,
1989).

The basic premise of the academic theory of HRM is that humans are not machines,
therefore we need to have an interdisciplinary examination of people in the
workplace. Fields such as psychology, industrial relations, industrial
engineering, sociology, economics, and critical theories: postmodernism, post-
structuralism play a major role. Many colleges and universities offer bachelor and
master degrees in Human Resources Management or in Human Resources and
Industrial Relations.

One widely used scheme to describe the role of HRM, developed by Dave Ulrich,
defines 4 fields for the HRM function:

 Strategic business partner

 Change Agent
 Employee champion
 Administration Expert

HRM strategy

An HRM strategy pertains to the means as to how to implement the specific functions of
Human Resourse Management. An organization's HR function may possess recruitment and
selection policies, disciplinary procedures, reward/recognition policies, an HR plan, or
learning and development policies, however all of these functional areas of HRM need to be
aligned and correlated, in order to correspond with the overall business strategy. An HRM
strategy thus is an overall plan, concerning the implementation of specific HRM functional
areas.
An HRM strategy typically consists of the following factors:-

 "Best fit" and "best practice" - meaning that there is correlation between the HRM
strategy and the overall corporate strategy. As HRM as a field seeks to manage human
resources in order to achieve properly organizational goals, an organization's HRM
strategy seeks to accomplish such management by applying a firm's personnel needs
with the goals/objectives of the organisation. As an example, a firm selling cars could
have a corporate strategy of increasing car sales by 10% over a five year period.
Accordingly, the HRM strategy would seek to facilitate how exactly to manage personnel
in order to achieve the 10% figure. Specific HRM functions, such as recruitment and
selection, reward/recognition, an HR plan, or learning and development policies, would
be tailored to achieve the corporate objectives.

 Close co-operation (at least in theory) between HR and the top/senior management,
in the development of the corporate strategy. Theoretically, a senior HR representative
should be present when an organization's corporate objectives are devised. This is so,
since it is a firm's personnel who actually construct a good, or provide a service. The
personnel's proper management is vital in the firm being successful, or even existing as
a going concern. Thus, HR can be seen as one of the critical departments within the
functional area of an organization.

 Continual monitoring of the strategy, via employee feedback, surveys, etc.

The implementation of an HR strategy is not always required, and may depend on a number
of factors, namely the size of the firm, the organizational culture within the firm or the
industry that the firm operates in and also the people in the firm.

An HRM strategy can be divided, in general, into two facets - the people strategy and the HR
functional strategy. The people strategy pertains to the point listed in the first paragraph,
namely the careful correlation of HRM policies/actions to attain the goals laid down in the
corporate strategy. The HR functional strategy relates to the policies employed within the HR
functional area itself, regarding the management of persons internal to it, to ensure its own
departmental goals are met.

E-HRM is the (planning, implementation and) application of information

technology for both networking and supporting at least two individual or collective
actors in their shared performing of HR activities.

E-HRM is not the same as HRIS (Human resource information system) which refers
to ICT systems used within HR departments.Nor is it the same as V-HRM or Virtual
HRM - which is defined by Lepak and Snell as "...a network-based structure built on
partnerships and typically mediated by information technologies to help the
organization acquire, develop, and deploy intellectual capital."

E-HRM is in essence the devolution of HR functions to management and employees.

They access these functions typically via intranet or other web-technology channels.
The empowerment of managers and employees to perform certain chosen HR
functions relieves the HR department of these tasks, allowing HR staff to focus less
on the operational and more on the strategic elements of HR, and allowing
organisations to lower HR department staffing levels as the administrative burden is
lightened. It is anticipated that, as E-HRM develops and becomes more entrenched
in business culture, these changes will become more apparent, but they have yet to
be manifested to a significant degree. A 2007 CIPD survey states that "The initial
research indicates that much-commented-on development such as shared services,
outsourcing and e-HR have had relatively little impact on costs or staff numbers"

Human Resource Management System (HRMS) or Human Resource

Information System (HRIS):

It refers to the systems and processes at the intersection between human resource

management (HRM) and information technology. It merges HRM as a discipline and
in particular its basic HR activities and processes with the information technology
field, whereas the programming of data processing systems evolved into
standardized routines and packages of enterprise resource planning (ERP) software.
On the whole, these ERP systems have their origin on software that integrates
information from different applications into one universal database. The linkage of its
financial and human resource modules through one database is the most important
distinction to the individually and proprietary developed predecessors, which makes
this software application both rigid and flexible.

Purpose

The function of Human Resources departments is generally administrative and

common to all organizations. Organizations may have formalized selection,
evaluation, and payroll processes. Efficient and effective management of "Human
Capital" progressed to an increasingly imperative and complex process. The HR
function consists of tracking existing employee data which traditionally includes
personal histories, skills, capabilities, accomplishments and salary. To reduce the
manual workload of these administrative activities, organizations began to
electronically automate many of these processes by introducing specialized Human
Resource Management Systems. HR executives rely on internal or external IT
professionals to develop and maintain an integrated HRMS. Before the
client architecture evolved in the late 1980s, many HR automation processes were
relegated to mainframe computers that could handle large amounts of data
transactions. In consequence of the high capital investment necessary to buy or
program proprietary software, these internally-developed HRMS were limited to
organizations that possessed a large amount of capital. The advent of client–
server, Application Service Provider, and Software as a Service SaaS or Human
Resource Management Systems enabled increasingly higher administrative control
of such systems. Currently Human Resource Management Systems encompass:

1. Payroll
2. Work Time
3. Benefits Administration
4. HR management Information system
5. Recruiting
6. Training/Learning Management System
7. Performance Record
8. Employee Self-Service
The payroll module automates the pay process by gathering data on employee time
and attendance, calculating various deductions and taxes, and generating periodic
pay cheques and employee tax reports. Data is generally fed from the human
resources and time keeping modules to calculate automatic deposit and manual
cheque writing capabilities. This module can encompass all employee-related
transactions as well as integrate with existing financial management systems.

The work time module gathers standardized time and work related efforts. The
most advanced modules provide broad flexibility in data collection methods, labor
distribution capabilities and data analysis features. Cost analysis and efficiency
metrics are the primary functions.

The benefits administration module provides a system for organizations to

administer and track employee participation in benefits programs. These typically
encompass insurance, compensation, profit sharing and retirement.

The HR management module is a component covering many other HR aspects

from application to retirement. The system records basic demographic and address
data, selection, training and development, capabilities and skills management,
compensation planning records and other related activities. Leading edge systems
provide the ability to "read" applications and enter relevant data to applicable
database fields, notify employers and provide position management and position
control. Human resource management function involves the recruitment, placement,
evaluation, compensation and development of the employees of an organization.
Initially, businesses used computer based information systems to:

 produce pay checks and payroll reports;

 maintain personnel records;
 pursue Talent Management.
Online recruiting has become one of the primary methods employed by HR
departments to garner potential candidates for available positions within an
organization. Talent Management systems typically encompass:

 analyzing personnel usage within an organization;

 identifying potential applicants;
 recruiting through company-facing listings;
 recruiting through online recruiting sites or publications that market to both
recruiters and applicants.
The significant cost incurred in maintaining an organized recruitment effort, cross-
posting within and across general or industry-specific job boards and maintaining a
competitive exposure of availabilities has given rise to the development of a
dedicated Applicant Tracking System, or 'ATS', module.

The training module provides a system for organizations to administer and track

employee training and development efforts. The system, normally called a Learning
Management System if a stand alone product, allows HR to track education,
qualifications and skills of the employees, as well as outlining what training courses,
books, CDs, web based learning or materials are available to develop which skills.
Courses can then be offered in date specific sessions, with delegates and training
resources being mapped and managed within the same system.
Sophisticated LMS allow managers to approve training, budgets and calendars
alongside performance management and appraisal metrics.

The Employee Self-Service module allows employees to query HR related data

and perform some HR transactions over the system. Employees may query their
attendance record from the system without asking the information from HR
personnel. The module also lets supervisors approve O.T. requests from their
subordinates through the system without overloading the task on HR department.
Many organizations have gone beyond the traditional functions and developed
human resource management information systems, which support recruitment,
selection, hiring, job placement, performance appraisals, employee benefit analysis,
health, safety and security, while others integrate an outsourced Applicant Tracking
System that encompasses a subset of the above.

Assigning Responsibilities Communication between the Employees.

Workforce Planning 

It is a continual process used to align the needs and priorities of the organisation
with those of its workforce to ensure it can meet its legislative, regulatory, service
and production requirements and organizational objectives. Workforce Planning
enables evidence based workforce development strategies.

Workforce Planning Definitions

Workforce Planning is the business process for ensuring that an organization has suitable
access to talent to ensure future business success. Access to talent includes considering all
potential access sources (employment, contracting out, partnerships, changing business
activities to modify the types of talent required, etc.). By talent is meant the skills, knowledge,
predisposition and ability to undertake required activities including decisions making.
Strategic Planning considers the business risks concerning insufficient, disrupted, mis-
deployed talent on the organization's business priorities. Workforce planning is considered
an iterative discipline. The cycle of workforce planning includes filling resource requests,
analyzing resource utilization, forecasting capacity, managing and identifying the resources
(human) to fill that capacity, and then re-starting the cycle.

Strategic Workforce Planning is broader and longer term than operational Workforce
Planning. Strategic Workforce Planning is the framework applied for Workforce Planning and
Workforce Development, where the links between corporate and strategic objectives and
their associated workforce implications are demonstrated. Strategic Workforce Planning
should take into account the projected loss of knowledge through employee exits and the
projected knowledge requirements for sustaining and progressing the business. Knowledge
requirements may include technology, new skills, new roles, documentation of key workforce
intelligence or new business demands. Operational Workforce Planning is narrower in
context and shorter term than strategic Workforce Planning. Operational Workforce Planning
involves the systems and processes adopted and evolved to enable strategic Workforce
Planning through the production of the evidence required for executive decision-making on
workforce matters. Operational Workforce Planning should initially be process based and
focused on building understanding and capabilities in Workforce Planning, supported by
simple tools, templates and techniques. Once established and practiced, these tools,
templates and techniques can become more sophisticated and linked to existing or new IT
systems to enable Workforce Planning to be integrated into normal business practice.

One of the more restrictive and potentially dangerous assumptions is that Strategic Planning
is only about talent in the form of employees. Hiring is a strategy for accessing talent and will
often be the superior one. However, the use of employees to meet talent needs carries with
it unique risks that can be mitigated using alternative access sourcing arrangements.
Regardless of the access source used, insightful assessment of the strategy's attendant
business risk is prudent.

The process for starting out Strategic Workforce Planning is linked with the organization's
strategy. This means identifying the critical talent needs that if not met can materially
adversely impact business success. Once the business risks are fully appreciated then
attention turns to schedule and timing. Assessing current internal capability and assessing
its relative position when it will be called upon in the future. Speculating on future sourcing
options and identifying the preferred sourcing option. Implementation and execution follow.
Attention to periodically reviewing the "sanity" of the current plan is prudent.

Workforce Analytics Approach

The focus is to analyse current and historical employee data to identify key
relationships among variables and use this to provide insight into the workforce they
need for the future. Workforce analysis usually includes reviewing employee
recruitment, promotion and turnover patterns. In addition the analysis can also
include reviewing the age and gender profiles of the workforce.

An analytical approach is important as it provides a fact based method of

understanding workforce behaviours. Workforce analytics also provides further
context to workforce planning efforts by ensuring perceived workforce behaviours
are consistent with actual behaviours identified using a more quantitative approach.

Steps in Workforce Planning

Though there is no definitive ‘Start here’ activity for any of the approaches to Strategic
Workforce Planning, there are five fundamentals activities that most Workforce Plan models
have:
 Environment Scan
 Current Workforce Profile
 Future Workforce View
 Analysis and Targeted Future
 Closing the gaps

Environment Scan

Environment Scanning is a form of business intelligence. In the context of Workforce

Planning it is used to identify the set of facts or circumstances that surround a workforce
situation or event.

Current Workforce Profile

Current State is a profile of the demand and supply factors both internally and
externally of the workforce the organization has ‘today’.
Future Workforce View
Future View is determining the organization’s needs considering the emerging trends
and issues identified during the Environment Scanning.

Future View is often where the different approaches identified above are applied:
Quantitative futuring: understanding the future you are currently tracking to by
forecasting; Qualitative futuring: scenario planning potential alternative futures in
terms of capabilities and demographics to deliver the business strategy.

Analysis and Targeted Future

Qualitative and quantitative futuring creates the content for an organizational unit to
analyse and identify critical elements. As the critical elements are identified the
Targeted Future begins to take form. The targeted future is the future that the
organization is going to target as being the best fit in terms of business strategy and
is achievable given the surrounding factors (internal/external, supply/demand).

Recruitment
It refers to the process of attracting, screening, and selecting qualified people for
a job at an organization or firm. For some components of the recruitment process,
mid- and large-size organizations often retain professional recruiters or outsource
some of the process to recruitment agencies.

The recruitment industry has five main types of agencies: employment agencies,

recruitment websites and job search engines, "head-hunters" for executive and
professional recruitment, niche agencies which specialize in a particular area of
staffing, or employer branding strategy and in-house recruitment. The stages in
recruitment include sourcing candidates by advertising or other methods, and
screening and selecting potential candidates using tests or interviews.

Headhunters
A "head-hunter" is an industry term for a third-party recruiter who seeks out
candidates often when normal recruitment efforts have failed. Headhunters are
generally considered more aggressive than in-house recruiters or may have pre-
existing industry experience and contacts. They may use advanced sales
techniques such as initially posing as clients to gather employee contacts as well as
visiting candidate offices. They may also purchase expensive lists of names and job
titles but more often will generate their own lists. They may arrange a meeting or a
formal interview between their client and the candidate and will usually prepare the
candidate for the interview, help negotiate the salary and conduct closure to the
search. They are frequently members in good standing of industry trade groups and
associations. Headhunters will often attend trade shows and other meetings
nationally or even internationally that may be attended by potential candidates and
hiring managers. Headhunters are typically small operations that make high margins
on candidate placements (sometimes more than 30% of the candidate’s annual
compensation). Due to their higher costs, headhunters are usually employed to fill
senior management and executive level roles. Headhunters are also used to recruit
very specialized individuals; for example, in some fields, such as emerging scientific
research areas, there may only be a handful of top-level professionals who are
active in the field. In this case, since there are so few qualified candidates, it makes
more sense to directly recruit them one-by-one, rather than advertise internationally
for candidates. While in-house recruiters tend to attract candidates for specific jobs,
headhunters will attract both candidates and actively seek them out as well. To do
so, they may network, cultivate relationships with various companies, maintain large
databases, purchase company directories or candidate lists and cold call prospective
recruits.

Recruitment Process
Job analysis
The proper start to a recruitment effort is to perform a job analysis, to document the
actual or intended requirement of the job to be performed. This information is
captured in a job description and provides the recruitment effort with the boundaries
and objectives of the search.Oftentimes a company will have job descriptions that
represent a historical collection of tasks performed in the past. These job
descriptions need to be reviewed or updated prior to a recruitment effort to reflect
present day requirements. Starting a recruitment with an accurate job analysis and
job description ensures the recruitment effort starts off on a proper track for success.

Sourcing
Sourcing involves 1) advertising, a common part of the recruiting process, often
encompassing multiple media, such as the Internet, general newspapers, job ad
newspapers, professional publications, window advertisements, job centers, and
campus graduate recruitment programs; and 2) recruiting research, which is the
proactive identification of relevant talent who may not respond to job postings and
other recruitment advertising methods done in #1. This initial research for so-called
passive prospects, also called name-generation, results in a list of prospects who
can then be contacted to solicit interest, obtain a resume/CV, and be screened (see
below).

Screening and selection

Suitability for a job is typically assessed by looking for skills, e.g.
communication, typing, and computer skills. Qualifications may be shown
through résumés, job applications, interviews, educational or professional
experience, the testimony of references, or in-house testing, such as for software
knowledge, typing skills, numeracy, and literacy, through psychological
tests or employment testing. Other resume screening criteria may include length of
service, job titles and length of time at a job. In some countries, employers are
legally mandated to provide equal opportunity in hiring. Business management
software is used by many recruitment agencies to automate the testing process.
Many recruiters and agencies are using an applicant tracking system to perform
many of the filtering tasks, along with software tools for psychometric testing.
Onboarding
"Onboarding" is a term which describes the process of helping new employees
become productive members of an organization. A well-planned introduction helps
new employees become fully operational quickly and is often integrated with a new
company and environment. Onboarding is included in the recruitment process for
retention purposes. Many companies have onboarding campaigns in hopes to retain
top talent that is new to the company; campaigns may last anywhere from 1 week to
6 months.

Internet recruitment and websites

Such sites have two main features: job boards and a résumé/curriculum vitae (CV)
database. Job boards allow member companies to post job vacancies. Alternatively,
candidates can upload a résumé to be included in searches by member companies.
Fees are charged for job postings and access to search resumes. Since the late
1990s, the recruitment website has evolved to encompass end-to-end recruitment.
Websites capture candidate details and then pool them in client accessed candidate
management interfaces (also online). Key players in this sector provide e-recruitment
software and services to organizations of all sizes and within numerous industry
sectors, who want to e-enable entirely or partly their recruitment process in order to
improve business performance.
The online software provided by those who specialize in online recruitment helps
organizations attract, test, recruit, employ and retain quality staff with a minimal
amount of administration. Online recruitment websites can be very helpful to find
candidates that are very actively looking for work and post their resumes online, but
they will not attract the "passive" candidates who might respond favorably to an
opportunity that is presented to them through other means. Also, some candidates
who are actively looking to change jobs are hesitant to put their resumes on the job
boards, for fear that their current companies, co-workers, customers or others might
see their resumes.

Job search engines

The emergence of meta-search engines allows job-seekers to search across multiple
websites. Some of these new search engines index and list the advertisements of
traditional job boards. These sites tend to aim for providing a "one-stop shop" for job-
seekers. However, there are many other job search engines which index pages
solely from employers' websites, choosing to bypass traditional job boards entirely.
These vertical search engines allow job-seekers to find new positions that may not
be advertised on traditional job boards, and online recruitment websites.

Recruitment Process Outsourcing

It is a form of business process outsourcing (BPO) where an employer outsources or

transfers all or part of its recruitment activities to an external service provider.

The Recruitment Process Outsourcing Association defines RPO as follows: "when a

provider acts as a company's internal recruitment function for a portion or all of its
jobs. RPO providers manage the entire recruiting/hiring process from job profiling
through the on boarding of the new hire, including staff, technology, method and
reporting. A properly managed RPO will improve a company's time to hire, increase
the quality of the candidate pool, provide verifiable metrics, reduce cost and improve
governmental compliance."

The RPO Alliance, a group of the Human Resources Outsourcing Association

(HROA), approved this definition in February 2009: "Recruitment Process
Outsourcing (RPO) is a form of business process outsourcing (BPO) where an
employer transfers all or part of its recruitment processes to an external service
provider. An RPO provider can provide its own or may assume the company's staff,
technology, methodologies and reporting. In all cases, RPO differs greatly from
providers such as staffing companies and contingent/retained search providers in
that it assumes ownership of the design and management of the recruitment process
and the responsibility of results."

Occasional recruitment support, for example temporary, contingency and executive

search services is more analogous to out-tasking, co-sourcing or just sourcing. In
this example, the service provider is "a" source for certain types of recruitment
activity.The biggest distinction between RPO and other types of staffing is Process.
In RPO, the service provider assumes ownership of the process, while in other types
of staffing the service provider is part of a process controlled by the organization
buying their services.

Benefits

RPO's promoters claim that the solution offers improvement in quality, cost, service
and speed.
 Quality and Cost - RPO providers claim that leveraging economies of
scale enables them to offer recruitment processes at lower cost while economies
of scope allow them to operate as high-quality specialists. Those economies of
scale and scope arise from a larger staff of recruiters, databases of candidate
resumes, and investment in recruitment tools and networks. RPO solutions are
also claimed to change fixed investment costs into variable costs that flex with
fluctuation in recruitment activity. Companies may pay by transaction rather than
by staff member, thus avoiding under-utilization or forcing costly layoffs of
recruitment staff when activity is low.

 Service and Speed - The commercial relationship between an RPO provider

and a client is likely to be based on specific performance targets. With
remuneration dependent on the attainment of such targets, an RPO provider will
concentrate their resources in the most effective way - at times to the exclusion of
non-core activity. Traditional internal recruitment teams are less likely to have
such clearly defined performance targets.
Organizations with efficient hiring process that are viewed as employers of choice by
potential staff may stand to gain benefits from an RPO process.

Functions

The Human Resources Management (HRM) function includes a variety of activities,

and key among them is deciding the staffing needs of an organization and whether
to use independent contractors or hire employees to fill these needs, recruiting and
training the best employees, ensuring they are high performers, dealing with
performance issues, and ensuring your personnel and management practices
conform to various regulations. Activities also include managing your approach to
employee benefits and compensation, employee records and personnel policies.
Usually small businesses (for-profit or nonprofit) have to carry out these activities
themselves because they can't yet afford part- or full-time help. However, they
should always ensure that employees have—and are aware of—personnel policies
which conform to current regulations. These policies are often in the form of
employee manuals, which all employees have.

Note that some people distinguish a difference between HRM (a major management
activity) and HRD (Human Resource Development, a profession). Those people
might include HRM in HRD, explaining that HRD includes the broader range of
activities to develop personnel inside of organizations, including, e.g., career
development, training, organization development, etc.

There is a long-standing argument about where HR-related functions should be

organized into large organizations, e.g., "should HR be in the Organization
Development department or the other way around?"

The HRM function and HRD profession have undergone major changes over the
past 20–30 years. Many years ago, large organizations looked to the "Personnel
Department," mostly to manage the paperwork around hiring and paying people.
More recently, organizations consider the "HR Department" as playing an important
role in staffing, training and helping to manage people so that people and the
organization are performing at maximum capability in a highly fulfilling manner.