Professional personnel is the main resource of a company, necessary for its prosperity. People are the main asset of any company that develops the business. Chapter five of Fundamentals of human resource management gives a full understanding of the fact that the success of a company depends on the quality of human capital. Moreover, it explains how exactly the recruitment system works. For example, for me, it was new to find out that companies use transitional matrixes to account for transitions of employees between various positions. The recruitment system is analyzed both objectively and subjectively. This is an important point as the chapter mentions certain recruitment sources which can help me as a future employee find an interesting job. What surprised me the most were the drawbacks of the downsizing concept. From chapter two I learned that downsizing is a source of increasing a company’s competitiveness. However, chapter five mentions that it can cause the loss of talent (Noe et al., 2019). This conception can negatively affect the productiveness of a business.
The candidate selection process is explicitly described in chapter six. It is the end of the process of selecting employees in accordance with the organization’s human resource needs. The final decision of the procedure is formed in several stages which applicants have to pass through. At each stage, some job hunters are eliminated based on eligibility criteria. A surprising fact is that computerization allowed recruiters to manage hundreds of job applications daily. It is done with an applicant tracking system (Noe et al., 2019), which filters resumes by their compliance with the company’s needs. The most surprising concept for me in this chapter was the background check by employers. It was new for me to find out that employers often check their potential workers via social media. In the future, while finding a job I will manage my social media pages carefully for them to look presentable.
The training process of employees is a program aimed at developing their professional knowledge, skills, and abilities that will help a company achieve its goals. Chapter seven provides the basic concepts of how a training program is implemented: by the needs assessment, which indicates what kind of training methods should be used, and the employee’s readiness for it. There are various methods that can be used by companies, such as learning in classes or online studying. The success of the program depends on whether the employee’s performance improves or not. It was fairly new for me to learn that if a company lacks in-house training experience, it can use the help of outside experts. If I ever start up a company in the future, I will train my employees with the help of outside sources until my company forms its own reliable program.
Chapter eight is devoted to employee development and explains how companies work in order to assist their personnel in future development. This chapter helped me find out a lot of new valuable information as I never thought that employers think of the future prosperity of their workers. Moreover, the most surprising concept in this chapter was the job rotation and enlargement techniques that managers use in order to develop the skills of their workers. Job rotation implies the assignment of various tasks from different areas to challenge employees and expand their knowledge. I am planning to have my own company in the future and this information can assist me in advancing my employees’ skills. There are also many factors mentioned in the chapter that can influence personnel improvements, such as assessment of work, mentorship, and educational programs to help workers grow professionally. Another interesting approach is how companies manage such issues as “the glass ceiling”. Development programs help face such problem and eliminate it.
Reference
Noe, R., Hollenbeck J., Gerhart B., & Wright P. (2019). Fundamentals of human resource management. McGraw-Hill Education.