Human Resource Management I: The Conceptual Framework, Human Resource Planning, Job Analysis, Recruitment, Selection, Placement and Induction

Human resource management is the part of management concerned with people at work and their relationships within the organisation. Its history runs through four stages. Welfare work came first: in India the Royal Commission on Labour (1931) recommended labour officers, and the Factories Act 1948 made a welfare officer compulsory in factories employing 500 or more workers, which is how many Indian personnel departments began. Personnel management, from the 1940s, was an administrative and largely reactive function: records, recruitment, discipline, wages and the handling of unions. Human resource management, from the 1980s, treats people as assets to be developed rather than costs to be minimised, and gives the line manager a larger role. Strategic HRM aligns HR policies with business strategy. The Indian Institute of Personnel Management (Calcutta, 1948) and the National Institute of Labour Management (Bombay, 1950) merged in 1980 to form the National Institute of Personnel Management, the profession's main body in India.

Two models frame the concept. The Michigan or "matching" model (Fombrun, Tichy and Devanna, 1984) is a hard model: HR is a resource to be matched to strategy through a cycle of selection, performance, appraisal, rewards and development. The Harvard model (Beer, Spector and colleagues, 1984) is a soft model: stakeholder interests and situational factors shape HRM policy choices (employee influence, HR flow, reward systems and work systems), which should produce the "four Cs" — commitment, competence, congruence and cost-effectiveness — and long-term consequences for individuals, the organisation and society. David Guest's model (1987) added the goals of strategic integration, high commitment, high quality and flexibility. The functions of HRM are usually grouped as acquisition, development, motivation (compensation and appraisal) and maintenance (welfare, safety and employee relations).

Human resource (manpower) planning is the process of forecasting an organisation's future demand for people, forecasting the supply it can expect, and planning to close the gap: getting the right number of the right people in the right jobs at the right time. The process is: analyse the organisation's objectives and plans; forecast demand; take stock of present manpower (a skills inventory); forecast supply, internal and external; estimate the net requirement (shortage or surplus); and draw up action plans for recruitment, training, promotion, redeployment or, in surplus, a hiring freeze, voluntary retirement or retrenchment. It operates at the national level (manpower planning in the Five-Year Plans), the sectoral level, the industry level and the unit level.

Job analysis is the systematic collection of information about a job: its tasks, duties and responsibilities, and the knowledge, skills, abilities and other characteristics a person needs to do it. It yields two documents. The job description states what the job is: title, location, duties, responsibilities, working conditions, tools, and reporting relationships. The job specification states what the job-holder must bring: education, experience, skills, physical and mental abilities, and personal qualities. Job analysis is the foundation of almost every other HR activity: HR planning, recruitment and selection, training needs, performance standards, job evaluation and wage fixation, safety, and job design.

• Methods: observation; interviews with job-holders and supervisors; structured questionnaires; diaries and logs; the critical incident technique (John Flanagan, 1954); technical conferences.
• Structured instruments: the Position Analysis Questionnaire (Ernest McCormick, 194 job elements); Functional Job Analysis (Sidney Fine), rating a job's relation to data, people and things; the Management Position Description Questionnaire.
• Job design follows from analysis: job simplification (Taylor's legacy), job rotation, job enlargement (horizontal loading, more tasks at the same level) and job enrichment (vertical loading, more responsibility and autonomy, from Herzberg).
• Hackman and Oldham's job characteristics model (1976) names five core dimensions: skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy and feedback.

Recruitment is the process of searching for prospective employees and stimulating them to apply; Edwin Flippo defined it as "the process of searching for prospective employees and stimulating and encouraging them to apply for jobs in an organisation". It is a positive process that widens the pool, while selection is often called negative because it rejects most applicants. Internal sources are promotion, transfer, re-employment of former employees and employee referrals; they raise morale and cost less but narrow the pool and can breed inbreeding. External sources are advertisement, employment exchanges, campus recruitment, placement agencies and consultants, walk-ins, job portals and social media, and recommendations of unions. In India the Employment Exchanges (Compulsory Notification of Vacancies) Act 1959 requires establishments in the public sector, and private establishments employing 25 or more persons, to notify vacancies to the employment exchange (it does not oblige them to recruit through it); the Act is now consolidated into the Code on Social Security 2020. Badli (substitute) lists are a traditional source in Indian factories, and public employment is subject to reservation for Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, Other Backward Classes, the Economically Weaker Sections and persons with disabilities.

Selection is choosing from the applicants those most likely to succeed in the job. The usual sequence is: preliminary screening of applications; application blank (a weighted application blank scores items that predict success); selection tests; interviews; reference and background checks; the selection decision; physical (medical) examination; and the offer of appointment. Each step is a hurdle, which is why this is called the successive-hurdles approach. Tests are of ability (intelligence, aptitude), achievement or proficiency (trade tests), personality, interest, and situational tests such as the in-basket exercise, the leaderless group discussion and the assessment centre, which combines several exercises observed by trained assessors. A good test must be reliable (it gives consistent results on repetition) and valid (it measures what it claims to measure and predicts job performance); a test can be reliable without being valid, but not valid without being reliable.

Interviews may be structured (patterned, the same questions for every candidate), unstructured (non-directive), stress, panel, behavioural (asking how the candidate actually handled past situations) or situational (asking what he would do). Interviewers make predictable errors: the halo effect, first impressions, contrast effects between successive candidates, similar-to-me bias, and stereotyping; structured interviews and trained panels reduce them. Placement is assigning the selected person to the job for which he or she was selected, and matching the person's abilities to the job's demands; a wrong placement shows up as absenteeism, accidents and turnover. Induction (orientation) is introducing the new employee to the organisation, the job, colleagues, rules, standing orders, welfare facilities, safety rules and grievance procedure; a planned induction programme reduces early turnover, which is highest in the first weeks of employment (the "induction crisis").