Recruitment and Selection

Strategies for Workforce Planning & Assessment

Carrie A. Picardi

• Editore: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Anno: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781483385419
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Business
• Categoria: Human Resource Management

The workforce is changing and talent management is more important than ever. Recruitment and Selection: Strategies for Workforce Planning & Assessment unpacks best practices for designing, implementing, and evaluating strategies for hiring the right people. Using a proven job analysis framework, author Carrie A. Picardi uses her academic and industry experience to teach students how to assess candidates in an accurate, legal, and ethical manner. With clarity and relevance, this book truly bridges theory and concept with practice in an engaging manner and will benefit students who need to hit the ground running to successfully manage workforce needs and activities in a myriad professional settings.

Chapter One Introduction to Workforce Planning and Assessment

Welcome to the complex, sometimes challenging, and thankfully often rewarding world of workforce assessment strategies and practices! What is workforce assessment, you ask? Workforce assessment is comprised of all the processes, systems, and tools used by an organization to make accurate, reliable, and effective decisions about the jobs needed to achieve business objectives, as well as the qualifications and performance expectations for the individuals working in those jobs. Assessment methods will impact an organization’s employees and job applicants beginning with the creation and development of a job itself and continuing through the recruitment of qualified candidates for the job, the selection of an individual to work in the job, the evaluation of his or her job performance, and the determination of training and development needs as well as goal setting to enable the employee to continue to perform the job to effectively meet organizational needs and goals. When an employee vacates a job, through resignation, termination, retirement, transfer, or promotion, this employee life cycle repeats from the beginning.

Workforce Assessment: Organizational strategy comprised of all the processes, tools, and systems to make effective decisions concerning work structure and job design, as well as the selection criteria and performance expectations for the individuals working in those jobs.

Employee Life Cycle: Process comprised of job recruitment, selection and hiring, performance management, training and development, and, ultimately, the conclusion of employment.

Before we begin, I thought I would share with you a bit of the history behind the idea for this book. I am an industrial/organizational psychologist and currently a professor for a private university where I teach courses in organizational behavior, human resource management, workforce assessment, and organizational development. I also conduct research in the area of performance management and have published and presented research study findings relevant to the accuracy of employee performance ratings. Prior to my life in academia, I was a human resources (HR) professional for a number of years, and throughout my business experience, I was responsible for every area of HR at one time or another. That includes job analysis and job description development, creation of competency models, compensation benchmarking and salary planning, recruitment and selection, new employee orientation, and management of the performance appraisal process and training and development programs, along with legal compliance, employee relations, and the maintenance of HR data and reporting. Through this experience, I quickly learned (and was often reminded) that job analysis is absolutely critical to everything else in the HR function. Let me repeat: Job analysis is the key to every strategy and practice in HR! I wish someone had given me this pearl of wisdom when I was a student or when I was first starting out in HR. Nevertheless, I did figure it out and was amazed at how little attention was paid to conducting regular job analyses.

Yes, of course in the real world, the pace of an organization is so rapid and ever shifting that it can be challenging for HR professionals to be vigilant with their job analysis evaluation and modification. However, it is well worth the effort and is perhaps the most valuable use of an HR practitioner’s time. The reason is simple: If a job is not clearly understood and defined in terms of its qualification requirements, level of authority, responsibilities, and tasks/duties, then its purpose and contribution toward the goals and objectives of its respective department as well as within the organization as a whole will be misaligned or lacking completely. This is an issue that many organizations struggle with—various jobs exist that have not been analyzed in a long time, and though the business needs have shifted, a job analysis has not been conducted to reflect what these jobs should actually look like to serve the organization effectively both presently and looking ahead to the future. This lack of alignment and accuracy will significantly impact an organization in myriad ways. At the staff level, individual employees are working on tasks every day that are irrelevant, redundant, and/or lack clear purpose and connection to job-related performance outcomes. At the department/functional level, operational efficiency and effectiveness are compromised because the work being performed by staff is not in alignment with the short- and long-term needs and objectives for that functional area, be it sales, finance, or research and development. In other words, some type of “work” is being performed but perhaps not exactly what the department needs to produce in terms of the high-quality and timely deliverables required to support the organization’s needs and business drivers. Lastly, at the organizational level, this lack of strategic alignment will often result in suboptimal productivity, innovation, and responsiveness to customers and other stakeholders. It is not that people are not doing any work—make no mistake, the cogs are turning within the organization, but they are not driving relevant outcomes that the organization needs in order to sustain high performance, agility, and competitiveness. From a systems perspective, the input is not generating the desired output. In this chapter, we will begin our exploration of what work looks like in today’s organizations and how jobs and workforce needs evolve based on changing expectations, goals, challenges, and external driving forces.

What Is “Work”? the Organization of Work and Jobs

Before we can even begin to understand how to develop assessment strategies necessary for job design and the recruitment and selection of talented and qualified individuals to successfully perform in an array of jobs across an organization, it is critical to first examine the organization itself, including its vision/mission, objectives, products, and services, in order to understand the type of work that needs to be performed. Once we understand the big picture, we can determine the work activities that will be needed to properly support the organization. These activities are typically referred to as tasks. A task is an activity requiring some combination of cognitive and physical performance resulting in a specific output. Some tasks are very unique and specific to just one or perhaps a few types of jobs (e.g., administering anesthesia, writing programming code). Other tasks are more general and may be more broadly relevant to many different jobs across functional areas/departments and organizations (e.g., handling monetary transactions, speaking to customers). Tasks will vary in terms of their complexity, frequency in which they are performed, and criticality to the organization. We will revisit this idea later on in the book, but it is important to point out here that not all tasks are created equal—tasks can vary tremendously from one another. Moreover, certain tasks are simple enough that many people would be able to perform them with relative ease, while other tasks may require individuals with specific physical and/or cognitive abilities as well as specialized education and training to successfully perform them.

Work: A relevant and strategic collection of tasks and responsibilities that are performed for a specific purpose and outcome.

Task: An activity requiring a specific combination of cognitive and physical performance that results in a targeted output.

In conducting an organizational needs assessment that will result in the identification of tasks and structuring of work and jobs, the following questions will be valuable to examine:

• What is the organization’s strategic plan, including its short- and long-term goals?
• What tasks and activities will need to be performed to meet stated goals and objectives?
• How should these tasks and activities be organized into logical functional areas?
• How should work relationships be structured among departments and functions?

Once information has been gathered that addresses these big-picture questions, job design (or redesign) can proceed as the next logical step in the workforce planning process. Job design requires answers to a different set of questions that will dive more deeply into and be specific to each job, including the following:

• How should tasks and activities within each functional area be organized, scheduled, and distributed to specific job roles?
• What are the qualifications necessary for individuals to successfully perform the essential tasks and activities for each job?
• What are the performance expectations that an individual in a specific job should be able to consistently demonstrate in order to contribute to the achievement of departmental/functional and organizational outcomes?

The question of how many jobs are needed at any given time will be directly aligned with an organization’s current and forecasted needs, so these micro-level and macro-level questions should go hand in hand. It is important to remember that just because a job has existed within an organization for years does not necessarily mean it will always be needed or relevant in exactly the same way. A job may have been critically important to achieving certain organizational goals at one time but may need to be reengineered as goals change. A job should exist because it enables an employee to perform the tasks and activities (i.e., the work) in a systematic way that produces targeted outcomes that, in turn, contribute to the achievement of organizational goals and objectives. The nature of work and the design of jobs have shifted and advanced dramatically in the past 100-plus years since the inception of the U.S. Industrial Revolution in the early 1900s. In this next section, we will explore the history and evolution of work structure and organization.

The Evolution of Work Structure

Perhaps the earliest evidence of the systematic organization of work and job design in industrialized environments can be examined through the work of Frederick Taylor, who developed the concept of scientific management, emphasizing production, streamlined processes, and the elimination of waste. Through his research involving work operations and time and motion studies, Taylor’s mission was to facilitate worker efficiency and productivity through job design. Another prominent researcher of this time was Max Weber, a trailblazer in research on organizational structure and bureaucracy. Weber’s focus was on hierarchical command and control, which featured prominently in the delegation of authority and decision-making power among different types and levels of jobs (Jex & Britt, 2008). Work was organized into simple, routine tasks—job design focused on a few basic tasks. Labor supply at the time was largely unskilled/semiskilled workers, and work was organized accordingly. As a result, an organizational hierarchy with greater supervisory span of control was necessary because workers had no authority or decision-making capability. This structure created high efficiency of production output for the jobs of that time, which were simplistic in terms of their skill requirements and activities. As a result of their theories and research findings, Frederick Taylor and Max Weber are considered to be pioneers in the area of job and organization design, significantly contributing to progress in the understanding of the nature of work and the context in which it is performed for maximum efficiency and effectiveness as society moved from mainly agrarian to industrialized. Though their work was more focused on work production than the needs of the workers themselves, Taylor and Weber laid the groundwork for future researchers such as Douglas McGregor (1960) and Abraham Maslow (1943) to expand into new and different directions that considered the needs of the employees as well as the organization.

Scientific Management: Concept developed by Frederick Taylor that emphasized worker efficiency and productivity through job design.

Management by Objectives: Also referred to as MBO, a concept developed by Peter Drucker to facilitate the alignment of organizational objectives with worker tasks, goals, and performance outcomes.

In the latter half of the 20th century, Peter Drucker emerged as one of the most influential experts in organizational structure, management strategy, and understanding the nature of work as technology and knowledge workers became increasingly ubiquitous. Drucker (1954) developed the concept of management by objectives, or MBO, to facilitate the alignment of organizational objectives with worker tasks, goals, and performance outcomes. The MBO strategy involves a manager and employee setting mutually agreed-upon work goals that have a clear connection to the organization’s goals, along with specific performance standards and expectations. The idea behind this approach is that employees will be more engaged and motivated to perform at a high level when they are involved in setting their own work goals and understand how their day-to-day work actually impacts the organization in meeting its overall objectives. Each employee would not only have a clear understanding of their job duties and responsibilities, but also the performance level their manager expects and how their contribution enables the organization to move forward. At the departmental/functional level, the MBO approach fosters more open lines of communication between managers and their staff and a two-way dialogue that allows employees to ask questions, seek clarification, and better understand the purpose and context for the work they perform. At the organizational level, managers can ensure that the work their staff is performing on a regular basis is directly in alignment with the organization’s focus and goals. That said, nothing ever stays the same, and as organizational needs shift, work goals and expectations will need to be evaluated and possibly readjusted. Myriad organizations...