Staffing and Recruiting during the Boom Years
One of the key areas that the HRM unit works with is the staffing
function. Hiring and on boarding of employees’ remains a critical
activity that many HR managers are yet to master. This is mainly because
of the unevenness of the demand and supply in the market for talent.
For instance, during the heady years of the IT boom in the early years
of the last decade, it was common for many division heads and line
managers to walk into the HR manager’s office and give him or her target
of employees to be recruited over the next three months in the quarter.
In the US, the situation was that many HR managers were asked to take
in as many H1B or temporary workers to the country on board to meet the
critical shortage in staff. In Asia, because of this very reason where
many techies had headed to the US and Europe, hiring became a challenge
for even the most seasoned HR professionals. The implications for the HR
manager are many as his or her appraisal depends on a number of targets
including how many they have recruited over the last quarter or the
year.
Strategies to Deal with Shortage of Talent during the Boom Years
The way to deal with such a situation was to ensure that the number
of people being taken in was based on current and future demand
scenarios and identify gaps and surpluses in key skill sets. For
instance, in the US, the shortage of those with Java skills was so huge
that anyone with an elementary knowledge of the skill was immediately
taken in the companies. This meant that the HR unit was simply filling
up positions without any strategic planning. Hence, many organizations
realized that hiring people without the requisite skills just to fill up
positions would do more harm than good to the companies and hence, a
conscious decision was taken by the HR managers in conjunction with the
line managers to have forecasts of how many employees they would need
over a quarter. The point here is that the constant bickering between
the HR managers and the line managers took a toll on organizational
efficiency and hence, this compromise was arrived at wherein the demand
for specific skill sets had to be forecasted by the line managers and
the HR managers would then deal with hiring accordingly. The third
aspect of the staffing and hiring activity is that many HR managers
during the boom years advised the line managers to find employees from
other divisions who wanted a change in their job profiles and roles.
This internal filling up of positions by inter-division and intra
company movement was effective in many companies like Fidelity. Further,
overtime by key resources and hiring temporary workers were the norm in
many companies. Of course, the overtime work was adequately compensated
and employees who were doing so were given additional benefits.
Staffing Strategies during the Ongoing Recession
With the boom years over, the HR managers in recent years are
breathing easy as they no longer have to run around trying to meet
recruitment targets. Of course, the current challenge before the HR
managers to manage the downturn and smoothen the downsizing underway in
many organizations. To ensure these objectives in these economically
harsh times, HR managers are resorting to passive measures as the first
line of action wherein they indicate to the employees that they are on
PIP or Performance Improvement Plans and this usually results in natural
attrition. Next, instead of downsizing, the HR managers are reducing
recruitment so that they do not have to fire employees and instead,
these employees can be accommodated elsewhere in the organization. These
are some of the aspects of the strategic workplace planning within the
hiring and staffing activity that some respected companies follow.
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