Introduction
Human resource professionals have been forced to think aggressively about their position due to the well-known COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, the pandemic has led to adapting to socially isolating tactics and overall new workplace conditions that HR managers may not have expected. Organizations have adopted a remote working approach and scale not seen before to slow the virus from spreading further. Human resource managers now have to deal with challenging tasks in difficult conditions without the benefit of regular face-to-face meetings. Human resources experts are now worried about their staff members’ health and safety in light of the ongoing pandemic. As a result, HR managers are stressed from dealing with the influx of laid-off employees who need processing and emotional support.
Human resources are putting forward efforts to keep their current workforce engaged, efficient, and connected, all moving targets throughout the new baseline. Due to rising worldwide competition and heightened customer expectations, businesses today must be more watchful than ever to thrive. Simply being proficient in marketing services and products or relying exclusively on the notoriety of a well-known company is not appropriate. Companies must be flexible to survive in today’s dynamic market(Hamouche 2021). Overall organizational development and growth throughout the new reality will depend on companies’ abilities to recruit and retain talented workers who adapt to the current circumstances ushered in by COVID-19. While COVID-19 has negatively impacted society as a collective unit, it has also affected various HRM functions, including employee engagement, recruitment and selection, motivation, HRD, and performance.
Human Resource Recruitment and Selection
Human resources’ recruitment responsibilities include advertising open positions to qualified people, conducting thorough interviews to determine which applicants have become the best fits for the open positions, making final hiring decisions, and easing new hires into their assigned tasks. Human resource departments employ a four-step recruitment procedure to efficiently and effectively fill open positions (Awu, 2021). The process consists of four steps: defining the role, finding candidates, interviewing them, and making a final decision. Recruitment refers to the steps taken to quickly identify, evaluate, and hire the most suitable people to fill open jobs within a business. Locally, from a pool of personnel who already work for the company and have the right abilities for the post and a motivation to occupy an available role, or outwardly, from the general public. Since competent individuals are necessary for achieving organizational objectives and revenues, recruitment becomes the first or initial stage within an organization’s ability to build corporate capital.
Online job interviews were often viewed as the final choice by many organizations well before the pandemic. Interviews conducted in person were commonplace, and some recruiting managers would sooner postpone or reschedule a meeting than conduct a seminar over video chat (Labour, 2021). Many companies now see that online job postings are not just the most effective method of hiring but also the future. The time and resources invested in conducting a traditional assessment, both for a company and the applicant, can be reduced significantly by interviewing online or using virtual elements.
Recruitment agencies are not constrained by a firm’s physical location, as more companies have begun to embrace flexible working arrangements. Recruiters can choose from a larger pool of qualified applicants. As a result of the pandemic’s unpredictability, potential employees are cautious about committing to startups or other high-risk businesses. Job-seekers are increasingly targeting more extensive, more secure organizations that can offer them long-term employment (Labour, 2021). Some industries, like entertainment and tourism, have been severely impacted by COVID-19, but others, such as the information technology industry, have benefited greatly.
Employee Engagement and Motivation
The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on the labor market. Workers’ mental health has suffered as a consequence of the constant change in the workplace, which has led to a rise in absenteeism and other negative results. Focusing on employee assignation is essential considering the one-of-a-kind circumstance affecting employees across all sectors throughout the globe and the established correlation between overall worker engagement and individual productivity. The current pandemic problem has made business more challenging, especially in human resources management (Awu, 2021). Large-scale shifts in society and workplaces are reportedly taking place, including the rise of telecommuting, various policies, and practices designed to reduce human contact in the office. Workers have trouble disconnecting from workplace expectations, dividing their time between the office and their personal lives, and sometimes facing additional psychosocial-based risks like solitude.
Employees are valuable assets in any organization; thus, the entire workplace has been presented with a one-of-a-kind challenge of ensuring the employees’ psychological and physiological well-being is intact while ensuring their security. Employees face a wide range of challenges, and if they can fulfill rigorous standards, it casts a new light upon their managerial and judgment call ability (Azizi et al.,2021). Throughout the era of COVID-19, the administration and the Human resources department play a crucial role in maintaining a positive attitude and promoting their teams’ performance.
Human Resource Development (HRD) and Performance
The spread of COVID-19 severely complicated the possibility of working remotely and crippled human resource development. Human resource professionals at many organizations have attempted to maintain communication with remote workers via email and phone calls. Still, it is not easy because many of them need help to use social media. Another area for keeping departments running faster is that some workers may not return to jobs in what seems like an entire physical capacity (Gigauri, 2020). Human resource professionals or managers and a portion of the existing workers are overworked, making it more difficult to run businesses as usual. Currently, the only option recommended is for departments to increase their use of working remotely to mitigate future damage to businesses.
Overall, the pandemic has negatively affected the entire performance of employees. Technically, this aspect implies that the company risks hiring an unwelcome group of employees who end up being a drain on resources rather than a source of innovation and, in turn, lowering employee performance (Gigauri, 2020). This act is feasible since employees come equipped with various unique drives, skills, capacities, feelings, and dispositions. In light of this disparity, workers’ abilities to adjust to the new normal ultimately range widely. HR managers must identify the best candidate during the hiring and selection operations.
Recommendations
To be successful throughout the post-COVID phase of recruitment, companies must use criteria of appropriateness that are both job-specific and easily discernible. When these prerequisites are met, hiring choices can be made about a participant’s suitability for the position based on objective facts instead of intuitions. As most firms struggle to restore order in the wake of the pandemic outbreak, a shortage of impartiality in recruitment and selection might have a negative impact (Awu, 2021). Therefore, to thrive mainly in this post-COVID era, businesses can take advantage of alternative HR strategic recommendations, as discussed below.
Universalist Approach
Organizations throughout the post-pandemic era may find the Universalist perspective instrumental. The universalist technique is predicated on the idea that independent of the company’s chosen competitive tactic, an elevated paradigm is causally linked to outstanding organizational performance from practically every conceivable angle(Labour, 2021). This technique allows businesses to increase employee performance and establish a competitive-based advantage by identifying and exploiting a linear connection between factors. These factors are ubiquitous and are typically cited as examples of optimal practice.
According to Labour (2021), human capital is considered the most critical asset of any company and the single most crucial factor in determining its success. Consequently, businesses throughout the post-pandemic era may adopt the universalist recruitment and selection strategy that improves their human resources and gains a long-term competitive edge (Labour, 2021). Organizations can achieve this approach by consistently employing and supervising their staff following generally accepted guiding principles. In a nutshell, specific human resource administration strategies are beneficial, whereas others are harmful or problematic, regardless of the state of the economy.
Resource-Based Approach
The method focuses on the relationships between internal corporate assets, strategic choices, and overall effectiveness. Instead of merely matching with contemporary strategic objectives, it focuses on building a lasting competitive edge by cultivating the appropriate human capital. There have been arguments that a company can acquire a competitive advantage if the workforce is distinct from those of other rivals and cannot be easily replaced. In contrast to the overall contingency theory of leadership, the entire resource-based technique considers the more fundamental attitudes, abilities, and capabilities of the organization’s human resources, all of which are more valuable in the future (Azizi et al., 2021). The productivity of an entire organization’s workforce is directly tied to effective recruitment and selection processes; therefore, adopting a resource-based strategy for recruitment may prove quite helpful.
In addition, it is essential to highlight that the approach acknowledges the possibility of developing strategic assets, such as HRD, by combining several different strategies to produce a novel one. This notion is an essential aspect of the concept that is interesting to note. That argument could be made clear with the use of specific instances. For example, the culture of Southwest Airlines may look easy to replicate, but in reality, it is quite challenging for many other airline companies (Gigauri, 2020). Similarly, businesses should develop recruitment and selection processes that meet the four requirements to attract and retain top talent. HR professionals should prioritize the development of differentiated elements that further validate human resources as a critical indicator of enterprise value.
Fit or Contingency Strategy
One way businesses can deal with the disruption that COVID-19 has caused is by adopting a contingency or appropriate strategy. Vertical integration (also known as externalized fit) and horizontal-based integration (also known as internal-based fit) are the two types of fit considered in this method. Vertical integration incorporates human resource strategies into the overall business strategy (Gigauri, 2020). By contrast, when everything fits together inside, the operations and the Human resource policies are mutually beneficial and effectively implemented.
Conclusion
COVID-19 and other developments in the business-based environment mean that companies must be extra attentive if they want to expand or even stay in the company. Human resource managers, in particular, should take a desirable management approach to empower the company. HR typically employs a mixture of resource-based, Universalist, and fit/contingency approaches. Human resource managers can improve the processes by adopting widely recognized best practices while using the Universalist strategy. Opportunities for advancement, performance reviews, job stability, and a voice in company decisions are all examples of such procedures.
Human resource professionals have been compelled to look critically at their roles. As a result, the epidemic has forced employees to adjust to new workplace norms and socially isolating strategies that HR managers may not have anticipated. Therefore, organizations have embraced a remote working strategy on a scale never before seen to stop the virus from spreading further. Managers of human resources are currently faced with arduous responsibilities and complex circumstances without the benefit of routine face-to-face interactions. Due to the growing outbreak, human resources professionals are now concerned about the health and safety of their employees. As a result of coping with the flood of laid-off workers who require processing and emotional support, HR managers are under stress.
References
Awu, Ebiasuode. (2021). The Impact of the Covid-19 Pandemic on Human Resource Management and the Role Changes of HR Managers in an Organization. Academic Research International. 5. 8-14.
Azizi, M. R., Atlasi, R., Ziapour, A., Abbas, J., &Naemi, R. (2021). Innovative human resource management strategies during the COVID-19 pandemic: A systematic narrative review approach. Heliyon, 7(6), e07233. Web.
Gigauri, I. (2020). Implications of COVID-19 for Human Resource Management. International Journal of Economics and Management Studies, 7(11), 25–33. Web.
Hamouche, S. (2021). Human resource management and the COVID-19 crisis: implications, challenges, opportunities, and future organizational directions. Journal of Management &Amp; Organization, pp. 1–16. Web.
Labour, E. (2021). How COVID-19 has fundamentally changed recruitment, EURES. Web.