EMPLOYEE RESOURCING STRATEGY

The employee resourcing strategy is concerned with ensuring that the organization obtains and
retains the people it needs and employs them efficiently.

The objective of employee resourcing Strategy

To obtain the right basic material in the form of a workforce endowed with appropriate qualities,
skills, knowledge and potential for future training. The selection and recruitment of workers best
suited to meeting the needs of the organization ought to form a core activity upon which most
other HRM policies are geared towards development and motivation could be built.

Integrating Business and Resourcing Strategies

The integration of business and resourcing strategies is based on an understanding of the
direction in which the organization is going and the determination:

1. The number of people required to meet business needs

2. The skills and behavior required to support the achievement of business strategies
3. The impact of organizational restructuring as a result of rationalization, decentralization,
delivering, acquisition, mergers, product or market development or the introduction of
new technology e.g cellular manufacturing.
4. Plans for changing the culture of the organization in such areas as ability to deliver,
performance standards, quality customer service, team working and flexibility, which
indicate the need for people with different attitudes beliefs and personal characteristics.

Components of Employee Resourcing Strategy

 Human Resourcing planning – Assessing future business needs and deciding on numbers
and types of people required
 Developing the organization’s employee value proposition and its employer brand
 Resourcing plans – Preparing plans for finding people from within the organization and
learning and development programmes to help people learn new skills. If needs cannot be
satisfied from within the organization, it involves preparing longer term plans for
ensuring that recruitment and selection process will satisfy them
 Retention strategy – Preparing plans for retaining the people the organization needs
 Flexibility strategy – Planning for increased flexibility in the use of human resources to
enable the organization to make the best use of people and adapt swiftly to changing
circumstances
 Talent management strategy – Ensuring that the organization has the talented people it
requires to provide for management succession and meet present and future needs
 Human Resourcing Planning
HRP determines the human resources required by the organization to achieve its strategic
goals. It is the process for ensuring that the human resource requirements of an
organization are identified and plans are made for satisfying those requirements. It
addresses human resource needs both in quantitative and qualitative terms. Therefore it
answers:
1. How many people
2. What sort of people

Approaches to HRP

1. Demand forecasting – Estimate future needs for people and competencies by reference to
corporate and functional plans and forecasts of future activity levels
2. Supply forecasting – Estimate the supply of people by reference to analyses of current
resources and availability, after allowing for wastage. The forecast will also take account
of labour market trends relating to the availability of skills and demographics
3. Forecasting requirements – Analyze the demand and supply forecasts to identify future
deficits or surpluses with the help of models where appropriate
4. Action planning – Prepare plans to deal with forecast deficits through internal promotion,
training or external recruitment. If necessary plan for unavoidable downsizing so as to
avoid any compulsory redundancies, if that is possible. Develop retention and flexibility
strategies

Human Resource planning flow chart

Employee value proposition

This consists of what the organization has to offer prospective or existing employees if they join
or remain with the business. Non-financial factors in attracting and retaining people include:

1. The attractiveness of the organization

2. Responsibility – corporate conduct and ethics
3. Respect – Diversity and conclusion
4. Work life balance
5. Opportunities for personal and professional growth

It is the employer brand. It is the set of attributes and qualities – often intangible – that make an
organization distinctive, promise s particular kind of employment experience and appeal to
people who will thrive and perform their best in its culture. To create an employer brand:

1. Analyze what ideal candidates need and want and decide what is to be offered
2. Establish how far core values of the organization support the creation of an attractive
brand
3. Define key features of the brand based on an examination and review of each of the
areas that affect the perceptions of the organization
4. Benchmark the approaches of other organizations to obtain ideas about what can be done
to enhance the brand
5. Be honest and realistic

Resourcing plans

Internal resourcing

Internal resourcing should be based on data already available about skills and potentials. This
should have been provided by regular skills audits and the analysis of the outcomes of
performance management reviews.

External resourcing

External resourcing requirements can be met by developing a recruitment strategy. The aims of
the strategy should:

1. Make the organization the employer of choice

2. The strategy should plan the best methods of defining precisely what is needed in terms
of skills and competencies
3. The strategy should be concerned with planning the use of the most effective method of
obtaining the number and type of people required

The strategy should be developed as follows

 1. Define skill and competency requirements – carried out by the use of systematic skills
and competency analysis techniques. They could form the basis upon which structured
interviews can take place and be used as the criterion for selection. They may also
indicate where psychometric tests could be helpful.
2. Analyze the factors affecting decisions to join the organization – these include:
i. Pay and total benefits package
ii. Career opportunities
iii. Opportunity to use existing skills or acquire new skills
iv. Opportunity to use the latest technology and equipment
v. Access to high – level training
vi. A responsible and intrinsically rewarding job
vii. A belief that what the organization is doing is worthwhile
viii. The reputation of the organization as an employer
ix. The opportunity the job will provide to further the individuals career
3. Competitive Resourcing – This is based upon an analysis of how the organization
competes with other firms for employees. Pay is one key area and it is important to track
market rates and make a policy decision on where the organization wants to be in relation
to the market
4. Alternative strategies for satisfying human resource requirements – These consists of
outsourcing reengineering, increasing flexibility skills training, multi skilling and
downsizing
5. Recruitment and selection techniques – The strategy explores both methods of recruiting
the number of people required but also finding staff who have necessary skills and
experience, who are likely to deliver the desired sort of behavior and who will fit into the
organization’s culture readily. These processes and techniques will include:
 Skills analysis
 Competency mapping
 The internet for recruitment
 Biodata
 Structured interviews
 Psychometric testing
 Assessment centres

Retention strategy

This aims to ensure that key people stay with the organization and wasteful and expensive levels
of employee turnover are reduced.

Analysis of reasons for staying or leaving

The reason why people stay in the organization should be measured through attitude surveys
A. Pay
Problems arise because of uncompetitive, inequitable or unfair pay systems. Possible
actions include:
i. Reviewing pay levels on the basis of market surveys
ii. Introducing job evaluation or improving an existing scheme to provide equitable
grading decisions
iii. Ensure employees understand the link between performance and reward
iv. Reviewing performance related pay schemes to ensure they operate fairly
v. Adapting payment by results system to ensure that employees are not penalized
when they are engaged only on the short run
vi. Tailoring benefits to individual requirements and performance
vii. Involving employees in developing and operating job evaluation and contingent
pay systems

B. Job design
Dissatisfaction results if jobs are unrewarding. Jobs should be designed to maximize skill
variety, task significance, autonomy and feedback and should provide opportunities for
learning and growth.

C. Performance
Employees can be demotivated if they are unclear about their responsibilities or
performance standards or feel that performance assessments are unfair. Actions to be
taken include:
i. Express performance requirements in terms of hard but attainable goals
ii. Get employees to agree on these goals and the steps to achieve them
iii. Encourage managers to praise employees for good performance but also get them
to provide regular, informative and easily interpreted feedback
iv. Train managers on performance review techniques and counseling
v. Brief employees on how performance management system work

D. Learning and development

Learning and development programme should be developed and introduced that:
i. Give employees competence and confidence to achieve expected performance
standards
ii. Enhance existing skills and competencies
iii. Help people acquire new skills and competencies so as to make better use of their
abilities
iv. Ensure that new employees quickly acquire and leran basic skills and knowledge
needed to make a good start in their jobs
v. Increase employability, inside and outside the organization
E. Career development
 Dissatisfaction with career prospects is a major cause of turnover
i. Providing employees with wider experience
ii. Introducing more systematic procedures for identifying potential
iii. Encouraging promotion from within
iv. Providing advice and guidance on career paths

F. Commitment
This can be increased by:
i. Explaining the organization’s mission, values and strategies
ii. Communication with employees in a candid and timely way
iii. Constantly seeking and taking into account the views of people at work
iv. Providing opportunities for employees to contribute their ideas on improving
work systems
v. Introducing organization and job changes only after consultation and discussion

G. Lack of group cohesion

Employees can feel isolated and unhappy if they are not part of a cohesive team. Steps
can be taken to tackle this problem through teamwork or teambuilding.
H. Dissatisfaction and conflict with managers and supervision
Common cause for resignations is the feeling that management is treating people
unfairly. This can be remedied by:
i. Selecting managers and team leaders with good leadership qualities
ii. Training them in leadership skills
iii. Introducing better procedures for handling grievances

I. Recruitment, selection and promotion

Rapid turnover can result through poor selection or promotion decisions. These should
match capacities of individuals

J. Over marketing
Creating unrealistic expectations about career development opportunities etc if not
matched can lead to early resignation.

Flexibility Strategy

This aims to provide a flexible firm with better operational and role flexibility when formulating
a flexibility strategy

i. Look at traditional employment patterns and find alternatives to fulltime, permanent staff
ii. Think about outsourcing
iii. Encourage multi skilling