Term Paper on "Human Resources Staffing"

Term Paper 10 pages (3090 words) Sources: 3 Style: APA

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Human Resources

Staffing

What is your human resource process? Define and describe it.

What are some of the problems associated with this particular process?

Annotated Bibliography

New Look at Organizational Career Development (Gutteridge, 1993)

The CEO as Organization Developer (Keough, 1992)

An Experiential Learning Approach to Employee Training Systems (Sims, 1990)

What is your experience with how this process works (and doesn't work)?

What have you learned from your benchmarking visit and your literature review about how to improve on this human resource process?

Hiring

Training

Career Planning

How would you devise an excellent example of this human resource process for Water Tight?

Bibliography

Introduction summary

What is your human resource process? Define and describe it -What are some of the problems associated with this particular process?

What is your experience with how this process works (and doesn't work)

This paper reviews the staffing practices at Water Tight Irrigation Systems.

The author spoke with the manager of HR and the CEO, who were willing to talk about their recruitment, hiring, employee motivation and other HR policies at the company. This paper will present the author's findings, then review several studies on the architecture and implementation of successful HR strategies. Finally, this paper will recommend a set of policies which could be implemented at Water Tight.

What is your human resource process? Define and describe it.

Water Tight is a company which has grown fairly quickly. From a small shop with 5 employees five years ago, it has now grown to 250 employees, and is one of the leading installation and maintenance companies for irrigation systems in a large metropolitan area. The author interviewed the Director of HR and the CEO in order to understand how Water Tight has found and integrated such a large number of employees in such a short time.

The HR manager was clearly overworked. With one assistant, she was responsible for the hiring for a net increase of over 100 people per year. Turnover, which was low a few years ago, has climbed to nearly 30% per year. This has a double effect on the HR manager's job: she must find new employees to add to Water Tight's growing workforce, and look for additional employees to replace those who have left.

Water Tight now performs about 15% of the irrigation systems installation in its market area. In the past, it hired employees with experience from competitor companies. Now that Water Tight has grown to a larger size, there are fewer such employees available. Part of the problem may be that competitors, who didn't want to continue losing employees to Water Tight, improved their hiring and retention practices. Although Water Tight pays slightly above industry averages, pay doesn't appear to be a sufficient enticement for many of those in the industry to leave their present company and join Water Tight.

Training up to now has been 'OJT,' or on-the-job training. Since many of Water Tight's managers have worked in this field for a number of years, they are generally able to integrate new workers and have more experienced workers help to 'show them the ropes.' As installation jobs have gotten more complex, this has become a major headache.

Customers are complaining about leaking installations more often than they had in the past. The CEO attributes these growing quality control programs to a lack of his direct supervision. He said that when things were smaller, he was able to bid on every job, and insure that things were done properly. Now that the company has grown to its present size, he's having to depend on managers who are responsible for both bidding and insuring quality control. He admitted some frustration that the managers in his company may not have the same expertise, or the same drive, as he does. it's one of the most frustrating things for the CEO to have no direct control over the results of his company's work.

Turnover has risen from approximately 10% per year to 30% over the past year. The HR manager suspects that some of the employees who have left have gone to competitors, but she is not sure. She has been so busy that she has not been able to conduct exit interviews. The turnover adds 75 positions to the 100 she must fill, which increases recruiting costs. She is thinking of adding two more assistants in order to deal with the increasing recruiting and hiring workload, but the CEO is hesitant to do so.

What are some of the problems associated with this particular process?

These problems are typical of a fast-growing organization that has gone from owner direct control to a management team between the owner and the end-product delivered. In this company, as in many others, the expertise and drive shown by the owner may not have been communicated to the entire organization. The very elements that made Water Tight grow so successfully are now those which could cause its growth to stall.

In short, the CEO and HR manager need to consider an organization which is focused on better people development and communications within the organization. This involves more than HR, but HR has a key role in this process. Once the CEO has decided on the processes he wants to put in place, HR's responsibility is to help the management team find and put in place the right people, and assist with training and career development in such a way that these new processes are supported.

Annotated Bibliography

New Look at Organizational Career Development (Gutteridge, 1993)

There has been a gradual tightening of the job market over the past few decades. No one can depend on technology alone to assure competitiveness -- the quality of people recruited and the quality of their training makes a significant difference in the company's ability to compete. The authors surveyed a number of organizations, and found that 70% were implementing an OCD program. It was surprising to the researchers that the companies did not see upward mobility as the primary argument for OCD, rather, most of those surveyed wanted to promote from within, and 14% found that there was a shortage of promotable talent, thus making it desirable to train their people to take on the jobs.

While the article is helpful in defending the need for OCD, it does not go into detail about how such programs are developed or monitored.

The CEO as Organization Developer (Keough, 1992)

The CEO has a critical role to design and guide the development of the organization. This article from McKinsey, the management consulting firm, found that CEO's must think through what it is that they want to accomplish, and to design the organization to make it happen. This may require a change in the CEO's behavior, from getting things done directly, to developing an organization capable of embodying the strategies and tactics he feels are necessary for the organization to be effective. As a part of the article, the authors interviewed Professor Forrester from MIT, who talked about designing the organization for a fast-growing computer firm.

Aimed primarily at the CEO, there are fewer suggestions given at the HR level about how to assist the CEO in the development of an organization.

An Experiential Learning Approach to Employee Training Systems (Sims, 1990)

This book covers how to develop learning systems in a company that are based on experiences, such as cases, rather than simply teaching techniques. Although technical training is necessary, grounding the training in experiences that the employee or manager may encounter may better prepare them for the challenges that they encounter in the company. The authors target HR managers who are responsible for designing training programs. They systematically cover training needs analysis, development, implementation and evaluation. They use systems analysis tools, which give an objective and thorough look at the needs of the company, and the needs that need to be filled in creating trained, capable employees.

The book lays out a case for employee training systems, but focuses almost exclusively on tactics. It does not do a particularly thorough job of discussing either the strategies behind training systems, nor how top management needs to participate.

What is your experience with how this process works (and doesn't work)?

I have worked in a company which grew very quickly. While it was in the wholesale electronics business, there were many items in common with Water Tight.

The CEO of that company was a very good salesperson who had developed a series of relationships amongst retail electronics buyers and stores. She was able to leverage these relationships when she opened the wholesale electronics company. She grew rapidly, from 40 employees in the first year to over 500 in the third year.

A joined the company as a summer worker, so had a low-level exposure to what was happening in the organization. I never met the CEO, but I had the impression from other managers that she continued to do an excellent job of generating orders with big retailers, such as Best… READ MORE

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