Activities and functions of the human resource management department require impeccable competence and professionalism to ensure the smooth and efficient running of the operations of the department. Gottfredson and Puryear observe that “in deciding what staffing needs you have 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.”
Over the decades, the Human Resource Management (HRM henceforth) profession, functions, and activities have undergone tremendous changes. In the distant past, a number of large organizations sought the help of personnel to manage the complexity of paperwork in hiring and remunerating employees. Recently, however, business enterprises and organizations have created individual human resource departments to facilitate the staffing, training, and management of people to enhance productivity and efficiency in the organization.
A number of recent developments—including demographic changes in the labor force, rapid technological change, increased global competition, tight labor markets in many sectors, experiments with new organizational arrangements, and public policy attention to workforce issues—are making human resource management (HRM) increasingly important for senior managers in organizations and for entrepreneurs.
In another observation, Caniëls and Gelderman point out that “recruitment and selection are important to businesses and organizations in implementing change and counteracting changes in the environmental context of business.” “Occupation and individual interests for jobs also change as organizations respond to economic and technological pressures” Kotabe. For instance, it has been observed that “corporations no longer have a centralized role in decision making, non-standard forms of employment have risen substantially, and outsourcing is increasing for most activities” Kotabe, Furthermore, “roles and tasks are changing rapidly, mostly in higher positioned jobs and HR managers will have difficulty in assessing job designs”. Moreover, there has been an urgent demand for a comprehensive management strategy that evaluates the effect of social, economic, and political impacts on the organizations’ survival and growth. The core function of human resource management in recruitment, as understood herein, is to keep the organization sufficiently and effectively staffed at all times.
With the process of staff recruitment and selection continuously posing critical challenges to managers, there is an urgent call and demand for a new and swift paradigm shift that embraces newer technologies and modern management strategies. The intricacy of matching the right candidate to the right job demands a critical human resource approach that is efficient but also effective to both an organization and the candidates as well.
In addition to the above, human resource management has a critical role in “emphasizing to the top corporate leaders that the HR department has the tools to build profit by supporting and engaging frontline agents most responsible for business success”. This ensures that the best talents are recruited to perform in areas and departments where their knowledge and skills are best suited for the success of the business. Such a process is critical to enhancing the abilities of the support managers and supervisors to accomplish their goals while making the best use of available tools.
Last, the human resource management has in ensuring that support managers and supervisors accomplish their goals by establishing tracking procedures to monitor the success, failures, and growth of support managers and supervisors to provide top leadership with the tools it needs to evaluate its frontline managers”. Such statistics are necessary for the measurement of the performances of the support managers and supervisors so that HR provides them with the needed support aimed at promoting their skills and knowledge for the success of the business.
In the recognition that people from the greatest asset of an organization, human resources must seek to recruit the best and appropriate personnel. This is because “effective management of a firm’s HR is crucial profitability and the overall ability of a firm achieve not only competitive tile advantage but also remain competitive”.