Staffing is the process of finding the right worker with appropriate qualifications or experience and recruiting them to fill a job position or role. [1] [2] Through this process, organizations acquire, deploy, and retain a workforce of sufficient quantity and quality to create positive impacts on the organization's effectiveness. [3] In management, staffing is an operation of recruiting the employees by evaluating their skills and knowledge before offering them specific job roles accordingly. [4]
A staffing model is a data set that measures work activities, how many labor hours are needed, and how employee time is spent.
Staffing helps to find and hire people who are qualified for the job position and will benefit the company. It also improves the quality and quantity of work done by the company because they have staffed the optimum people. Job satisfaction rates are likely to increase because everyone is well-suited for their position and is happy to be doing their specialty of work. Higher rates of productive performance from the company are also common, as they have staffed the right people to do their jobs. It provides employees the opportunity for further growth and development. [5]
Staffing an organization focuses on both the quality and the quantity of the staff.
The quantity is the number of staff. The organization forecasts workforce quantity requirements and then compares it to the available workforce. If the headcount matches the requirement, then the organization is fully staffed. If the requirement exceeds the number of available employees, then the organization is understaffed. If the available staff exceeds the requirements, then the organization is overstaffed and may need to stop hiring and layoff employees. When a company is understaffed, the staffing process may restart. [3]
The quality is having the right person for the job. The right person should have a job and an organization match. The job match involves the employee's knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics and how they work with the job's tasks. The organization match is when the person has the same organizational values as the organization. [6]
Human resource management (HRM) encompasses a spectrum of functions and activities aimed at managing an organization's workforce effectively. Core staffing activities are integral components of HRM, focusing on the acquisition and management of human resources within an organization. These activities are fundamental in building and maintaining a skilled and motivated workforce. The five core staffing activities are recruitment, selection, employment, training and retention.
Recruitment serves as the foundation of an effective staffing system. [3] Unlike the private sector, where profit motives often drive hiring decisions, the public sector focuses on providing essential public services. A well-executed recruitment process is instrumental in identifying, attracting. and engaging potential candidates who possess the requisite qualifications and characteristics to excel in specific job roles. Key components of recruitment include:
Goals and Job Descriptions
Prior to initiating the recruitment process, organizations must define clear goals and job descriptions. This entails evaluating positions and job categories by conducting a thorough examination known as job analysis, which is a comprehensive procedure for documenting and defining job roles and tasks. [7] Job analysis is widely regarded as a fundamental component of successful HRM, and it holds particular significance in staffing processes such as recruitment and selection, where it helps gauge the extent of job performance. [8] It centers on delineating the job's duties, obligations, necessary expertise, skills, and other essential attributes needed to execute the role. [9]
Internal vs. External Recruitment
Organizations face a critical decision regarding whether to recruit internally or externally. Internal recruitment involves filling a vacancy from within the existing workforce, promoting loyalty and potentially reducing costs. [10] However, it may limit innovation and leave gaps in the workforce. External recruitment, on the other hand, seeks candidates outside the organization, increasing the chances of recruiting experienced and qualified individuals. [10] Yet, external recruits may lack a deep understanding of the company culture, and internal disputes may arise.
Depending on the chosen recruitment approach, organizations can employ various communication strategies. In an open recruitment system, all employees are notified about job openings and are given the opportunity to apply. In a closed recruitment system, only specific employees are informed about the vacancy. A hybrid recruitment system combines elements of both open and closed recruitment. [11]
Sourcing Candidates
Effective recruitment hinges on diverse sourcing strategies. Job boards like LinkedIn and Indeed serve as central hubs, reaching a wide audience. Social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter provide direct access to candidates. Furthermore, organizational career pages offer convenience. [12] It is important to collaborate with external agencies broadens the talent pool.
Selection holds significant importance within the staffing procedure, as mishandling it may result in the organization missing out on potential candidates. The primary aim of the selection process is to assess whether a candidate is a suitable fit for employment within the organization or not. [13]
Candidate Evaluation: This process starts with the review of the job applications, résumés, and cover letters of the job candidates. During the reviewing of candidates, initial screening is an important aspect too. As part of evaluating a candidate, testing include personality, ability, and intelligence tests can be undertaken.
Interviews: Interviews are vital for HR professionals to assess candidates. Behavioral interviews focus on past experiences to predict future performance. [14] Technical interviews evaluate candidates' skills. Panel interviews involve multiple interviewers, providing diverse perspectives. These methods help in comprehensive candidate evaluation.
Contingent assessment: Depending on the organization, this is the last step. It includes drug tests and medical exams. The final step may encompass drug tests and medical exams to ensure candidates meet specific health and safety requirements. [15]
When staffing, mainly for the public sector, recruitment and selection processes are distinctive due to the heightened importance of transparency, accountability, and alignment with public values. These processes are often subject to intense public scrutiny, necessitating a commitment to transparency in all stages of sourcing, evaluation, and selection. [16] to ensure that candidates are assessed solely on their qualifications and competencies, thereby mitigating personal connections or favoritism. Below are some of them:
Merit Based Selection: This is an important standard to ensure that candidates are evaluated based on qualifications and competencies rather than personal connections or favoritism. [16]
Alignment with Organizational Values: Candidates in the public sector are typically assessed for their alignment with public service principles, commitment to transparency, and ability to make decisions in the public interest.
Diversity and Inclusion: Public sector recruitment efforts place a strong emphasis on diversity and inclusion to ensure that the government workforce reflects the diverse populations it serves. [16]
Employment is the process of hiring the individual who was selected in the selection process. The organization should first propose a job offer, which typically includes starting date, duration of the contract, compensation, starting rate, benefits, and hours of the position. The organization then prepares for the new employee's arrival. Ideally, the company should make sure that the employee has all of the tools required to do their job effectively, such as security badges, keys, and any other technology. [17]
After the selection of an employee, the employee receives training. With the various technological changes in modern history, the need for training employees is increased to keep the employees in touch with the various new developments. [18] Staffing can be influenced by how staffers are trained and the type of training they receive.
Training is generally classified into two types, on the job and off the job. Some examples of training programs include: [19]
A scenario in the U.S Federal Workforce suggested that High-Performance Work System (HPWS) perspective is a theoretical framework that discovers the connections between human resource practices and organisational outcomes. Significantly, HPWS focuses on the belief that effective HR practices within an organisation implementation will fabricate a workforce that compromised both effective and efficient employees with the qualities of trained, motivated, and dedicated. HPWSs are composed of interrelated HR practices (HPWPs) that are used to cultivate employees' talents and skills and ultimately apply their abilities to their work, which encourage positive organisational outcomes such as motivation, dedication, and retention. [20] Training and development opportunities are one such HPWP that is explored further. The efficacy of a HPWS increases when multiple HPWPs are administered simultaneously in bundles. Some HPWPs include efficient recruitment and selection, enhanced training and development, and competitive compensation and incentives.
The Job Demand-Resources (JD-R) model is a theoretical framework that explains how job demands and job resources can impact employee well-being and work engagement. In this model, training and development is considered a job resource that can buffer the impact of job demands and increase rates of work engagement. Even though training and development is contemplated a job resource in the JD-R model, relatively few studies examine whether having access to training and developmental opportunities buffer the impact of job demands and rocket rates of work engagement, especially on a sample from the federal workforce. [21] Studies have connected training to work outcomes and have seen its positive effects on employees. These outcomes include four increased rates of (i)positive efficacy, (ii)job satisfaction, (iii)job performance, and (iv)organisational performance. Moreover, access training, as a job resource, positively correlates with work engagement and negatively correlates with burnout and turnover.
Self-efficacy- refers to an individual belief in their ability to perform a specific task or achieve a specific goal. It is the passion and mentality that an individual has and to head on all the challenges faced while striving to accomplish target goals. Individuals with high self-efficacy are more motivated and committed to transferring the learned skills to their workplace. [22] In short, self-efficacy is having the 'I can do it' belief.
Instrumentality/utility- refers to an individual's perception of the usefulness of training activities. Perception could be based on how employees interpret different sensations. When trainees attach value to training activities, they are more likely to be motivated to learn and apply the learned skills in their jobs. [23] In short, instrumentality is having the 'I will do it' belief.
For instance, if an individual has the passion and competence to do the job, he/she will enjoy it, and it will be more meaningful in having lots of ideas for improvement and innovation implemented into the workplace, which will be a very different scenario from those who are not interested, who will just be keep watching the time to go home, more like looking busy doing nothing.
Therefore, both beliefs are significant predictors of training implementation behaviours as individuals with high self-efficacy and high instrumentality beliefs are more likely to implement the training they received on their jobs and transforming the skills to reality in workplaces. [24]
Perceived flexibility - refers to the extent to which employees perceive their work environment as flexible, moderates the relationship between self-efficacy beliefs and training implementation behaviours. [25]
Performance feedback - refers to the extent to which employees receive feedback on their performance, and moderates the relationship between instrumentality beliefs and training implementation behaviours. [25]
Supervisor support – refers to the direct effect on training implementation behaviours. [26]
Employees can leave jobs for a variety of different reasons. Employers should listen to the needs of their employees and make them feel valued. Employers need to create a positive work culture and motivating practices into their organization to keep employees.
Retention methods have a positive impact on the organization's turnover rate. Benefits can include training, positive culture, growth opportunities within the organization, trust and confidence in leaders, and lower stress from overworking. [29]
Staffing agencies are becoming more common because of their ease of use and low cost. Companies save a lot of money through using a staffing agency because they do not have to spend extra money on employee recruitment or fund any of the screenings new hires must undergo. Using a staffing agency eliminates the need for companies to do extensive advertisements about the positions they are hiring for. The agencies save time by avoiding having to spend a large amount of time searching for applicants and recruiting new people. Staffing agencies provide a large network of job candidates, so it is easy to find people to fill the jobs. They have many tools and the knowledge to find the perfect applicants for the jobs each company needs to fill. If a company has an unexpected need to fill a position, a staffing agency can usually quickly find someone. [30] [31] [32]
Staffing technology is a broad term that encompasses the systems, processes, and software used by modern-day recruiting teams. It includes databases, applicant tracking systems (ATS), and complex web-based job boards. [33] Staffing technology has come a long way from fax machines and telephones. In the last decade, modern-day technology, including live and asynchronous online video interviewing, artificial intelligence, chatbots, and social media, has influenced the staffing field. [34] It has evolved significantly over the past decade, and today, it is no longer a matter of either/or when it comes to sourcing strategies. Staffing technologies can be used in unison to generate even better results in many cases. For instance, sourcing algorithms can identify candidates who are likely to fit a job well. [33] Technology is being utilized to speed up the hiring process, reduce hiring costs, enhance the candidate experience during the hiring processes, facilitate candidate assessment and selection. Staffing technology can also be used to socialize new hires, track employees' skills and promotion readiness, along with retention enhancement and the creation of better relationships with high-potential future applicants (. [34] Staffing technologies have made the job search process more efficient for companies and transparent for job seekers and employers alike.
Top Trends in Staffing Technologies:
Applicant Tracking System (ATS)
An applicant tracking system enables firms to gather data, classify prospects according to experience and skill level, and screen candidates. ATS is time efficient for organisations as the recruiters spend less time eliminating the less suitable individuals who have applied for certain roles due to the fact that many vacant positions can get hundreds or even more applicants that are unqualified. [33] It screens and sort through CV’s using cutting-edge technologies like artificial intelligence and natural language processing matching an analyzing data using other algorithms.
Benefits of using ATS in Staffing processes
Candidate Recruitment Management (CRM)
CRM for recruiting helps companies find the best candidates for each role and fill positions by automating communications, creating an organized and accessible candidate database. The database includes real-time insights and offers multiple views to showcase data in various ways. [35] The most powerful CRM software includes several beneficial features that simplify the development of candidates' profiles and talent pools, reduce time-to-hire, and increase recruitment team productivity.
CRM promotes engagement and enhances candidates' experience by streamlining candidate communication and maintaining and enhancing relationships through automated email marketing, recruiting features, a job suggestion portal, and other means. [35] [33] Some of the features of CRM include:
Benefits of using CRM in Staffing processes
Overall benefits of staffing technologies include:
Industrial and organizational psychology "focuses the lens of psychological science on a key aspect of human life, namely, their work lives. In general, the goals of I-O psychology are to better understand and optimize the effectiveness, health, and well-being of both individuals and organizations." It is an applied discipline within psychology and is an international profession. I-O psychology is also known as occupational psychology in the United Kingdom, organisational psychology in Australia and New Zealand, and work and organizational (WO) psychology throughout Europe and Brazil. Industrial, work, and organizational (IWO) psychology is the broader, more global term for the science and profession.
Expectancy theory proposes that an individual will behave or act in a certain way because they are motivated to select a specific behavior over others due to what they expect the result of that selected behavior will be. In essence, the motivation of the behavior selection is determined by the desirability of the outcome. However, at the core of the theory is the cognitive process of how an individual processes the different motivational elements. This is done before making the ultimate choice. The outcome is not the sole determining factor in making the decision of how to behave.
Recruitment is the overall process of identifying, sourcing, screening, shortlisting, and interviewing candidates for jobs within an organization. Recruitment also is the process involved in choosing people for unpaid roles. Managers, human resource generalists, and recruitment specialists may be tasked with carrying out recruitment, but in some cases, public-sector employment, commercial recruitment agencies, or specialist search consultancies such as Executive search in the case of more senior roles, are used to undertake parts of the process. Internet-based recruitment is now widespread, including the use of artificial intelligence (AI).
A job interview is an interview consisting of a conversation between a job applicant and a representative of an employer which is conducted to assess whether the applicant should be hired. Interviews are one of the most common methods of employee selection. Interviews vary in the extent to which the questions are structured, from an unstructured and informal conversation to a structured interview in which an applicant is asked a predetermined list of questions in a specified order; structured interviews are usually more accurate predictors of which applicants will make suitable employees, according to research studies.
Workforce management (WFM) is an institutional process that maximizes performance levels and competency for an organization. The process includes all the activities needed to maintain a productive workforce, such as field service management, human resource management, performance and training management, data collection, recruiting, budgeting, forecasting, scheduling and analytics.
Workforce productivity is the amount of goods and services that a group of workers produce in a given amount of time. It is one of several types of productivity that economists measure. Workforce productivity, often referred to as labor productivity, is a measure for an organisation or company, a process, an industry, or a country.
Employee engagement is a fundamental concept in the effort to understand and describe, both qualitatively and quantitatively, the nature of the relationship between an organization and its employees. An "engaged employee" is defined as one who is fully absorbed by and enthusiastic about their work and so takes positive action to further the organization's reputation and interests. An engaged employee has a positive attitude towards the organization and its values. In contrast, a disengaged employee may range from someone doing the bare minimum at work, up to an employee who is actively damaging the company's work output and reputation.
Onboarding or organizational socialization is the American term for the mechanism through which new employees acquire the necessary knowledge, skills, and behaviors to become effective organizational members and insiders. In standard English, this is referred to as "induction". In the United States, up to 25% of workers are organizational newcomers engaged in onboarding process.
A job description or JD is a written narrative that describes the general tasks, or other related duties, and responsibilities of a position. It may specify the functionary to whom the position reports, specifications such as the qualifications or skills needed by the person in the job, information about the equipment, tools and work aids used, working conditions, physical demands, and a salary range. Job descriptions are usually narrative, but some may comprise a simple list of competencies; for instance, strategic human resource planning methodologies may be used to develop a competency architecture for an organization, from which job descriptions are built as a shortlist of competencies.
Talent management (TM) is the anticipation of required human capital for an organization and the planning to meet those needs. The field has been growing in significance and gaining interest among practitioners as well as in the scholarly debate over the past 10 years as of 2020, particularly after McKinsey's 1997 research and the 2001 book on The War for Talent. Although much of the previous research focused on private companies and organizations, TM is now also found in public organizations.
Training and development involves improving the effectiveness of organizations and the individuals and teams within them. Training may be viewed as being related to immediate changes in effectiveness via organized instruction, while development is related to the progress of longer-term organizational and employee goals. While training and development technically have differing definitions, the terms are often used interchangeably. Training and development have historically been topics within adult education and applied psychology, but have within the last two decades become closely associated with human resources management, talent management, human resources development, instructional design, human factors, and knowledge management.
An application for employment is a standard business document that is prepared with questions deemed relevant by employers. It is used to determine the best candidate to fill a specific role within the company. Most companies provide such forms to anyone upon request, at which point it becomes the responsibility of the applicant to complete the form and return it to the employer for consideration. The completed and returned document notifies the company of the applicant's availability and desire to be employed as well as their qualifications and background so that a determination can be made as to the candidate's suitability to the position.
E-HRM is the planning, implementation and application of information technology for both networking and supporting at least two individual or collective actors in their shared performing of HR activities.
The war for talent is a term coined by Steven Hankin of McKinsey & Company in 1997, and a book by Ed Michaels, Helen Handfield-Jones, and Beth Axelrod, Harvard Business Press, 2001 ISBN 978-1-57851-459-5. The war for talent refers to an increasingly competitive landscape for recruiting and retaining talented employees. In the book, Michaels, et al., describe not a set of superior Human Resources processes, but a mindset that emphasizes the importance of talent to the success of organizations.
Employee retention is the ability of an organization to retain its employees and ensure sustainability. Employee retention can be represented by a simple statistic. Employee retention is also the strategies employers use to try to retain the employees in their workforce.
Competency-based recruitment is a process of recruitment based on the ability of candidates to produce anecdotes about their professional experience which can be used as evidence that the candidate has a given competency. Candidates demonstrate competencies on the application form, and then in the interview, which in this case is known as a competency-based interview.
Human resource planning is a process that identifies current and future human resources needs for an organization to achieve its goals. Human resource planning should serve as a link between human resource management and the overall strategic plan of an organization. Ageing workers population in most western countries and growing demands for qualified workers in developing economies have underscored the importance of effective human resource planning.
An assessment day is usually used in the context of recruitment. On this day, a group of applicants who have applied for a particular role are invited to an assessment centre, where a combination of selection techniques are used by the employers to measure the suitability of an individual for the job role. These selection technique usually include exercises such as presentation, group exercise, one to one Interview, role play, psychometric test etc. Most large organisations like banks, audit and IT firms use assessment days to recruit the fresh talent in their graduate programmes. With an increase of popularity of assessment days, several training institutes have been formed that prepare candidates for assessment days, for example, Green Turn is a famous institute that prepares candidates for assessment days of big 4 accountancy firms.
Recruitment marketing refers to the inbound strategies and tactics an organization uses to find, attract, engage, and nurture talent before they apply for a job, also called the pre-applicant phase of talent acquisition. It is the practice of promoting the benefits and value of working for an employer in order to recruit talent. It is analogous in many ways to corporate marketing, and is extremely similar to employer branding except recruitment marketing relates to trackable initiatives that drive awareness, engagement and conversion of applicants versus someone's impression of working at a company. Of course others see employer branding as a subset of recruitment marketing, in addition to extending the reach and exposure of career opportunities through search engine optimization (SEO), building and nurturing candidate relationships through talent communities, and the management of messaging and advertising of talent acquisition efforts.
A human resources management system (HRMS), also human resources information system (HRIS) or human capital management (HCM) system, is a form of human resources (HR) software that combines a number of systems and processes to ensure the easy management of human resources, business processes and data. Human resources software is used by businesses to combine a number of necessary HR functions, such as storing employee data, managing payroll, recruitment, benefits administration, time and attendance, employee performance management, and tracking competency and training records.