Currently, the technologies that HR management utilizes show a high degree of complexity. The growing demand for talents in millions of companies worldwide makes the competition in the sphere tough. HR managers bear the responsibility for hiring a worker that will prove extremely beneficial for a company’s performance. Fewer employees are needed in companies to perform routine tasks, as the atomization and standardization processes have already ensured that people are involved predominantly in the processes that require a wide range of social skills. Therefore, it has become harder for HR managers to evaluate the qualities and personal traits that are considered to be desirable for the enhancement of a company’s activities.
New Trends in HR
Modern recruiters are expected to be capable of evaluating a person’s soft skills and envision his/her integration into the workplace. Given the importance of diversity in modern HR management, it has become complicated for HR managers to classify all these soft skills, rank them, and evaluate the level of creativity an applicant demonstrates. Moreover, the ability to show initiative while staying autonomous and responsible should balance with the ability of an employee to always remain loyal to the company’s core values. The ability to share new ideas and promote changes should not undermine the strong company culture that may have been built by generations of previous, more conservative workers.
The Importance of Labor Planning
Labor planning is a crucial part of HR managers’ work. Moreover, its results can immediately affect a company’s financial standing. The number of employees needed at a given time is as essential for a company, as their expertise and personal qualities. According to Pessach et al. (2020), poor recruitment decisions may lead not only to low-performing employees but also to increased turnover. Thus, HR managers should slightly shift their focus towards the number of people they hire from the development of new techniques to attract new talents.
The engineering company I worked for in the past featured various issues concerning its HR management that hindered it from establishing a sophisticated and efficient framework for hiring, retaining, and developing new talents. For instance, the rapidly growing number of employees at some point become a problem that made the company freeze all the anticipated pay rises. That undermined the employees’ motivation and the overall atmosphere in the workplace. According to Schwind et al. (2019), companies can introduce leaves without pay, termination, hiring freeze, and early retirement offers. Thus, there are different ways to manage an oversupply of human resources.
Termination of employment executed by an employer always brings numerous issues and undermines team spirit. Therefore, cooperation with other company’s departments in the first place proves to be more beneficial and helps to escape the necessity to fire employees or leave them without pay rise. In order to make the termination process efficient and seamless, every company should always provide a special clause in the work contract stipulating all the minor details and guaranteeing benefits when a worker is dismissed. This option ensures that a nice working atmosphere is maintained even if some workers leave the company.
The Use of Automated Processes in Recruitment
HR management had to be transformed by the company’s top management, as the job market has been influenced by various demographic and economic trends recently. Budiartha (2018) states that recently the high unemployment rates have increased the number of jobs that require creative innovation and professional organizational management skills. According to Gupta et al. (2018), the HR industry at large is aware of the challenges faced by the recruitment teams in terms of the various hiring functions involving sales engine, sourcing, interviewing, and providing offers. Nevertheless, the issues that the engineering company I worked for faced showcase that all the changes that a company’s top management or HR managers are willing to undertake should be thoroughly analyzed first.
The enhancement of diversity and integrity have become major trends in HR management recently. According to Berson et al. (2020), access to a centralized HR department in the selection of applications has an essential effect on the level of discrimination. Currently, some companies are working on various automized systems that can assist companies in providing HR managers with ready, less biased recruitment and retainment decisions. Nevertheless, the existing software does not allow an utterly unbiased selection result. Therefore, new approaches are to be developed in order to enhance HR managers’ performance.
What is more, equity has become an increasingly popular trend in the workplace atmosphere. The HR department is generally perceived to be one of the most autonomous and creative in most types of companies. Nevertheless, Vankevich (2019) states that sometimes HR specialists do not link the organization’s business strategy to the strategy of human resource management. Such imbalances frequently occur in huge corporations and undermine not just the efficiency of a company’s activities but the working environment and the company culture.
Many scholars have long been advocating for the creation and establishment of sophisticated software that can make unbiased decisions and help people working in HR departments deal with the enormous workflow. Recruitment through information technology has many points of interest over the conventional method for recruitment (Ezam et al., 2018). Malik and Mujtaba (2018) state that e-recruitment has significant impact on the effectiveness of HR managers in the private sector. The Future trends in recruitment include a wide use of SMAC – social, versatile, examination, and cloud technology on one incorporated stack, where each capacity empowers another to augment their impact (Denis et al., 2020). Therefore, recruitment continues to be the leader among the HR departments’ activities when it comes to the utilization of modern technologies.
In the engineering company I used to work for, top management showed interest in the implementation of automized technologies and software in almost every sphere of the company’s activities. HR management was not an exception, with automated electronic recruitment systems sometimes substituting real professionals that have already proven to be extremely beneficial for the company. Nevertheless, these undertakings had cost cuts, not increased efficiency as their primary goal. Therefore, the efficiency of such an approach was limited, as some of the new employees turned out to be arrogant and did not seem to integrate well into the existing working environment. Thus, the use of automated software that is capable of evaluating numerous CVs is currently limited.
The engineering company also experimented with outsourcing HR management. Moreover, they paid for consultants’ services in order to acquire valuable data on what kind of employees are the most efficient. The use of various factors of e-consulting helps companies to withstand the demand and serve efficiently and effectively (Poorani & Thiyagarajan, 2018). Nevertheless, the services that the top management was ready to pay for was of low quality. They undoubtedly undermined the expertise of the company’s HR managers, who used to conduct their own research and were better informed on the company’s demand for new talents. Therefore, top management needed to trust the company’s HR managers’ choices that used to be of better quality than the advice of mediocre consultants.
The Use of Artificial Intelligence in Selection
Although currently, the quality of automized e-systems does not always allow for high-quality, unbiased decisions, a new type of technology can improve the general audience’s attitude to them. Artificial intelligence opens up completely new opportunities for a fast and efficient decision-making process when it comes to selection and staffing. According to Krishnakumar (2019), the perception that AI is fact-oriented and unbiased has led to a number of changes in organizational recruitment practices. Therefore, HR managers may eventually acquire the tool that can help them meet the company’s high demands concerning privacy, efficiency, and diversity.
My previous working experience in a large engineering company helps me realize the scope of the problem. In order to overcome biased decisions, inefficiencies, and numerous other issues, new tools and approaches are needed. In the near future, sophisticated and affordable software based on AI will allow companies to standardize and automize the processes associated with recruiting and retaining employees. Individual sets of criteria will be compared against thousands of applicants’ CVs. At the same time, numerous more efficient KPIs will ensure that high performers stay motivated without undermining the much-valued equity and integrity.
Conclusion
The above mentioned issues that the engineering company had to deal with can be addressed with the help of AI systems. Moreover, the wide use of such technologies will not undermine the HR managers’ efforts. Just like in any other sphere, professionals working there will be granted an opportunity to direct creative processes instead. For instance, HR managers will dedicate more of their time to developing new techniques to retain and encourage workers instead of analyzing numerous CVs. Therefore, new legislation is desperately needed that will cover the use of AI-based recruitment and retainment systems and the processing of a large amount of data. The case of the health care system proves that the development and employment of the needed legal framework can be performed efficiently and in due course.
References
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Budiartha, I. (2018). Problems and challenges empowering human resources (HR) in company organization in globalisation era. Sociological Jurisprudence Jornal, 1(1), 1–6. Web.
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Pessach, D., Singer, G., Avrahami, D., Ben-Gal, H. C., Shmueli, E., & Ben-Gal, I. (2020). Employees recruitment: A prescriptive analytics approach via machine learning and mathematical programming. Decision Support Systems, 134(7), 113290.
Poorani, T., & Thiyagarajan, S. (2018). Assessing value creation of HR consultants on e-consulting implementation. Technology in Society, 55(11), 160–165.
Schwind, H. F., Uggerslev, K., Wagar, T. H., & Fassina, N. (2019). Canadian Human Resource Management (12th ed.). McGraw-Hill Education.
Vankevich, A. (2019). HR-Departments of organizations: Scope of activity and prospects in the conditions of new industrialization. Proceedings of the 2nd International Scientific conference on New Industrialization: Global, national, regional dimension (SICNI 2018) (pp. 675–679). Atlantis Press.