Analysing labour markets

1. RESPONDING TO LABOUR MARKET TRENDS The starting point for all strategic activity in HRM is to understand the environment in which an organisation operates. It is only possible to formulate the most appropriate policies and practices once its key features have been identified and their importance grasped. In the field of employee resourcing

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Flexible resourcing choices for human ressource needs

1. FLEXIBLE RESOURCING CHOICES Understanding the dynamics of the organisational environment is only one part of taking a strategic approach to employee resourcing. Having gained an understanding one must decide how the organisation can best interact with its environment to maximise its performance. One set of key choices concerns the extent to which the

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Contracts of employmen, Working patterns and Flexible working hours

1. CONTRACTS OF EMPLOYMENT As far as the law is concerned over 80 per cent of people who work in the UK are employees. This means that they have a contract of employment with their employer, with the duties and privileges that that implies. The employer may be an individual, as with most small

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Contractual arrangements, Consultants and Outsourcing

1. ATYPICAL CONTRACTUAL ARRANGEMENTS Recent decades have seen the growth of contractual arrangements that differ from the permanent, open-ended, full-time, workplace-based form of employment that has always been regarded as representing the norm. There has always been considerable disagreement about the significance of these trends. For some they mark the ‘beginning of the end’

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Introduction to Recruitment

There is always a need for replacement employees and those with unfamiliar skills that business growth makes necessary, and with the Institute for Employment Research (2006) now estimating that UK employers will be creating an additional 1.3 million jobs before 2014, it is clear that effective recruitment will remain a central HR objective for

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Internal recruitment

Vacancies, of course, are often filled internally. Sometimes organisations advertise all vacancies publicly as a matter of course and consider internal candidates along with any­one from outside the organisation who applies. This approach is generally considered to constitute good practice and is widely used in the UK’s public sector. However, many organisations prefer to

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Methods of recruitment and Employer branding

1. METHODS OF RECRUITMENT Once an employer has decided that external recruitment is necessary, a cost-effective and appropriate method of recruitment must be selected. There are a number of distinct approaches to choose from, each of which is more or less appropriate in different cir­cumstances. As a result most employers use a wide variety

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Control and evaluation, Correspondence and Shortlisting of candidatures

1. CONTROL AND EVALUATION The HR manager needs to monitor the effectiveness of advertising and all other methods of recruitment, first, to ensure value for money and, second, to ensure that the pool of applicants produced by the various methods is suitable. Wright and Storey (1994, p. 209) suggest that information on the following

Introduction to selection methods of candidature

1. SELECTION AS A TWO-WAY PROCESS The various stages of the selection process provide information for decisions by both the employer and the potential employee. While employment decisions have long been regarded as a management prerogative there is considerable evidence that the two-way nature of the process is now being widely acknowledged, and Lievens

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Choosing and validating the selection method of candidatures

1. SELECTION METHODS In Chapter 7 on recruitment we considered the shortlisting process and the sifting of applications. We go on to look at selection methods in more detail, many of which may be used at different stages in the selection process, including shortlisting and sifting. We deal with interviews in depth in the

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Staff retention and Turnover

The last three chapters focused on the processes used to mobilise a workforce: activities which are often expensive and time consuming. It is estimated that the costs associated with recruiting and training a new employee average between half and one and a half times the annual salary for the post in question, depending on

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Turnover analysis and Staff retention strategies

1. TURNOVER ANALYSIS AND COSTING There is little that an organisation can do to manage turnover unless there is an under­standing of the reasons for it. Information about these reasons is notoriously difficult to collect. Most commentators recommend exit interviews (that is, interviews with leavers about their reasons for resigning), but the problem here

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Ending the HR contracts: dismissal and Notice

In the last chapter we looked at situations in which employees decide to end their con­tracts of employment by giving their employers notice. Here we focus on circumstances when the contract is brought to an end by the employer through a dismissal of one kind or another, something that over a million employees experience

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Strategic HR aspects of performance

In our opening chapters we described the shift in emphasis away from the contract of employment towards the contract for performance. Even before the development of Taylor’s scientific management methods a century ago, getting the most out of the workforce has always been a predominant management preoccupation, and the manage­ment literature is full of

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Human resource management and organizational performance

1. HOW DO HR POLICIES AND PRACTICES AFFECT PERFORMANCE? If we accept that there is sufficient evidence to claim that HR policies and practices do affect company performance (although some studies, for example Lahteenmaki and Storey 1998 do not support this) then we need to understand better the processes which link these HR practices

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Organisational performance and learning

There was a time when performance was seen primarily in terms of individual motiva­tion and performance. The focus has now shifted to emphasise performance of the organisation as a whole. While some performance variations are the result of individual differences, ultimate organisational performance can also be significantly affected by systems, processes, structures and culture.

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Knowledge management in HRM

1. KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT Knowledge and its perceived value Knowledge is increasingly viewed as a critical organisational resource which provides competitive advantage, and as Gourlay (2006) demonstrates, it has a particular import­ance for multinational companies (MNCs). As the speed of change gets faster organisa­tions increasingly need innovations, new ideas and new ways of doing things

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Employee performance management

Managing individual performance in organisations has traditionally centred on assess­ing performance and allocating reward, with effective performance seen as the result of the interaction between individual ability and motivation. Increasingly, it is recognised that planning and enabling performance have a critical effect on individual performance, with performance goals and standards, appropriate resources, guidance and

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Leadership in management and Leadership styles

1. LEADERSHIP AND MANAGEMENT Northouse (2006) suggests that there are four components that characterise leadership: that leadership is a process; it involves influence; it occurs within a group context; and it involves goal attainment. This corresponds with Shackleton’s (1995) definition, which we shall use as a working definition for the remainder of the chapter:

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Leadership and change

1. DO WE REALLY NEED HEROES? A different approach to understanding leadership is transformational leadership, which focuses on the leader’s role at a strategic level, so there is a concentration on the one leader at the top of the organisaton. There is a wide range of literature in this vein, most of it written

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