Managers carefully conduct the recruitment and selection tasks by identifying the right people to fill posts that fall vacant at the place of work. An example in point occurred when Stephen Connor experienced a recruitment problem as an HRM of the New York investment banking firm where Peter worked as a semiconductor analyst for many years. Stephen’s challenge was to identify a person with the right skills, knowledge, and experience to fill the vacancy as quickly as possible (Phillips & Gully, 2014). The primary objective was to replace Peter by a person who could facilitate and maintain the company’s prime competitive advantage against rival firms by keeping a strong corporate culture at the company’s research division.
In the context of the study, Phillips and Gully (2014) the manager’s duty was to hire, compensate, motivate, and develop the right staff. Stephen was required to demonstrate competency in the management function of forecasting the expected shortage of workers due to keeping an inventory of the talent of each employee to avoid the last minute search for a new employee.
Based on the case study, Stephen was an experienced HRM because of his recruitment and selection strategy. However, he failed to apply his gap analysis skills to create a talent replacement chart for future talent needs to merge the demand and supply of labour (Phillips & Gully, 2014). Another serious problem was that the recruitment process lacked a task statement that stipulates the responsibilities and behaviour required for the job. Besides, he did not have a job enrichment, rotation, and enhancement program to increase the job complexity to give employees a better sense of involvement, engagement, and motivation.
However, a critical review of Stephen’s recruitment and selection approach showed that he failed to remove recruitment barriers because no advertisement was done to fill the new vacant post in the company. Stephen did not conduct a job analysis to identify and establish the right hiring requirements that were necessary for an employee to succeed in the job. Besides, Stephen did not create opportunities for other qualified candidates to apply for the post. Stephen did not articulate the process of establishing a standard compensation plan besides the prejudice and bigotry shown towards David because of his advancing age (Phillips & Gully, 2014). Here, Stephen does not indicate anywhere in the case study that he tried to establish the reasons that led Peter to leave the job despite his exceptional performance to avoid a similar problem occurring in future.
However, it was necessary for Stephen to investigate and understand the reasons that led to Peter’s backing out of his job. However, it was advisable for Stephen to adhere to the HRM practices for recruiting and selecting prospective employees and not to rely on his intuition (Phillips & Gully, 2014). It was necessary for Stephen to set up a training and development program for the career development of the employees as part of a plan to motivate and retain them. Also, the interviews were conducted by Peter alone without any input from other senior executives, a process that was vulnerable to stereotyping and personal prejudice.
In conclusion, Stephen had severe HRM leadership problem in recruiting and selecting the right candidate to fill the vacancy that was caused by Peter’s decision to leave the job as an analyst.
Reference
Phillips, J. M., & Gully, S. M. (2014). Human Resource Management. Nashville, TN: South-Western Publishing.