Description of Human Resource Management Terms - Case Study Example

HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT CASE STUDY ESSAY Name Course Date Introduction Human resource management (HRM) entails a variety of functions that contribute to the overall success of an organization. Recruitment and remuneration are two inseparable human resource management concepts involved in the process of hiring new employees in an organization. Recruitment and remuneration strategies adopted by an organization play a crucial role in determining whether an organization can secure the targeted workforce and maintain it through acceptable compensation. Both tasks are crucial to the human resource acquisition process in the University of South California (USC). The university views them as crucial steps in the success of the overall goal of the institution. The organizational culture of USC contributed significantly to its success in poaching Arthur Toga and Paul Thompson. The two are prominent, excellent neuroscientists whose demand was high because other institutions also wanted to recruit them. Description of human resource management terms a. Recruitment and poaching Choosing the right people for the right job is the main task of human resource management.1 The hiring process has several stages including recruitment and remuneration. Recruitment refers to the way in which organizations try to source or attract people.2 It entails luring the right people for a particular job. Recruitment also involves searching for potential employees and encouraging them to apply for jobs.3 Poaching or raiding refers to attracting or cajoling the employees of rival organizations with attractive offers.4 In employee poaching, the organization contacts the employees of their rivals either directly or indirectly and persuades them to join the organization. The red-hot competition for skilled human resources is no longer news.5 b. Remuneration Another significant term in this case study is the word remuneration. Remuneration is the compensation received by an employee in return for his contribution to an organization.6 Employees are usually entitled to several benefits that are either financial or non-financial. Typical remuneration of employees comprises of wages, salaries, fringe benefits, incentives, perquisites and non-monetary benefits. Remuneration is usually the method that the organization uses to reward employees for the work done and entice them to continue working for the organization.7 Recruitment and remuneration strategies adopted by USC USC’s recruitment and remuneration strategy is one of the greatest approaches ever used to attract employees from competitors. The university’s approach played a critical role in influencing the targeted employees to choose to work for the organization. Organizational choice is among the key issues that challenge most potential employees as they attempt to search for employment. Organizational choice refers to a person’s choice of a certain organization for which to work.8 USC used an extremely aggressive approach that influenced Arthur Toga and Paul Thompson to choose the organization as the perfect employer. The objective factor theory states that potential employees choose jobs by ranking and evaluating a number of measurable features of the job such as salaries, type of work and further development opportunities.9 USC was clever enough to notice the factors that would influence the employees to change their minds. In spite of a long and unsuccessful period of courting the two employees, UCS considered several factors that played a vital role in attracting the personnel. The first critical factor in the recruitment process was the university’s move to offer more money to the employees than they got in their previous locations. This was not just a way of enticing them, but also a way of rewarding them for accepting to work for the university. The institution also promised to offer improved facilities compared to those offered by other potential employers. It also offered a large budget. Moreover, USC won the hearts of these renowned neuroscientists by promising to offer anything else they wanted. Nothing could lure them more than USC’s commitment to build excellent programs, facilities and other considerations. For instance, Toga got attracted by commute time, proximity to his family. To Thompson, the climate of Southern California is an idea preference compared to the burden that his family and lab staff would experience because of relocating to Pennsylvania. USC had carefully analyzed the expectations of the targeted employees and decided to recruit and remunerate them according to their expectations. The university had to act according to the behavioral choices of the employees in order to win them. The primary premise of the expectancy theory is that individuals make behavioral choices that help them achieve desired outcomes.10 Both organizational and environmental cultures have significant influences in the expectancy theory.11 USC university has adopted an organizational culture that aligns with is strategic goals in terms of employee recruitment and remuneration; hence, its success in hiring highly proficient expertise. The university has an organizational culture that helped it to create and maintain relationships with employees. This explains why USC was able to lure Toga and Thompson because of the entire recruitment process was hospitable. The first stage of negotiations involves building interpersonal relationships between negotiating parties.12 Negotiations between USC and the employees started three years ago with offers of money and facilities. Later on, the university started to build relationships with the employees. University executives went to the extent of inviting Toga for a dinner from where he realized that he really wanted to work for the university. Equality at the workplace is one of the key attractions of employees. Although laws have made a difference in addressing inequalities, there is a considerable challenge in the achievement of equality in the work place.13 USC employees act against the olds by embracing a very enticing organizational culture that enforces the recruitment process. It is quite attractive to see a senior person such as a dean knowing janitors and greeting them the way he greets officials from the medical school faculty. Dr. Carmen Puliafito, the dean of USC medical school, convinced Thompson that USC is the right place because Carmen treats all employees the same. Equality exists between senior school officials (such as doctors) and junior staff such as janitors. This provides USC with the capacity to attract new recruits easily compared to the university’s rivals. How the remuneration strategies adopted by the University of Southern California complement to their recruitment strategies The recruitment and compensation strategies used by USC complement each other leading to the success of the employment process. The major driver of this triumphant achievement is because the university offers the best to attract the best. USC pledged to offer all finest things that would make the employees change their minds and work for the school. Money is itself a form of remuneration that attracts recruits to the organization. Promising attractive monetary rewards was a useful recruitment strategy that the employees could not afford to ignore. The attraction strategy is the same reward strategy that the organization uses to maintain the employees because they get large amounts of money. The same applies to the promise of a large budget, which reinforces the recruitment process. A large budgets appeals to the employees because in implies that they will have all their financial needs covered by the university. The mentioning of attractive facilities is a worthwhile recruitment tactic that fascinated the two workers. The same facilities are a form of remuneration that will keep on motivating the employees to remain in the organization because the facilities are incomparable with those of rivals. The staffs are most likely to remain in the organization because the availability of improved facilities offers them many benefits that competing institutions cannot offer. The relationship between the employees and the university grew from the first attempts to recruit them because every attractive promise had a remuneration strategy behind it. How recruitment and remuneration strategies contributed to the strategic objectives of the University of Southern California At the heart of every organization are strategic objectives that the organization wishes to realize in the long term. Strategic objectives refer to areas in which the organization directs its efforts to drive its mission and vision.14 The objectives can be measureable, non-measurable or continuous. An organization uses strategic objectives to move from ideas to actions. This is evident in USC’s adoption of recruitment and remuneration schemes that foster the organization’s strategic objectives. In its strategic vision, USC advocates for high quality standards in all aspects. Its strategic vision requires every new faculty appointment, promotion and award of tenure to provide evidence of the university’s status as one of the leading research universities in the world.15 The vision of being a leading institution is eminent in the case of poaching Toga and Thompson. USC promoted this goal by offering the best recruitment and remuneration offers that competitors such as University of California/Los Angeles and University of Pennsylvania do not offer. The recruitment and remuneration techniques adopted by the university also depict the university’s sensitivity to quality. USC’s strategic vision also states that the achievement of quality is not only through the recruitment of new transformative scholars, but by supporting existing outstanding faculty.16 The university will also continue to recruit, promote, reward, mentor and retain innovative, prolific, respected and engaged faculty staff.17 USC acknowledges that such staff acts as a catalyst that ignites intellectual activity across the university. The achievement of these strategic objectives is evident in the case study because the university provost and vice provost focused highly transformative scholars. Both Toga and Thompson are highly experienced scholars and practitioners with a high potential of transforming the university. In the case study, the university put maximum efforts on recruitment and compensation as part of the fulfillment of its strategic goal of recruiting, promoting and rewarding its new recruits. The university also aims at improving quality by supporting others to attain their full potential and adopting standards of excellence to novice forms of interdisciplinary work.18 In human resource management, excellent performance standards serve as benchmarks to measure performance.19 USC maintained its excellent standards by recruiting high-standard employees; thus, contributing to the strategic goal of promoting excellence. USC also has an ultimate goal of creating a transformative culture.20 This culture is evident in USC’s endeavor to build and maintain relationships and encourage employees to network. With this culture, employees feel comfortable to join the organization. They are sure that working for the university will bring benefits that are beyond the capacity of other institutions. Conclusion Recruitment and remuneration are critical processes for any organization that needs to grow. They are vital roles for the human resource management department and their success determines the success of the organization. In the University of Southern California, recruitment and remuneration strategies used in the case of poaching new employees have played a significant role. They have contributed to the achievement of the university’s strategic goals. Adopting the appropriate hiring strategies has enabled USC stand out among many competitors who include fellow universities. The victory of these approaches was mainly because both recruitment and remuneration tactics used complement each other. Excellent organizational culture has also contributed to the achievement of long-term strategic goals. This implies that the process of hiring employees entails many issues both inside and outside the organization. In order to maintain a strong relationship with the new recruits, USC must stick to the promises it made to them. It ought to maintain its standards because other institutions remain potential rivals in the recruitment of high-profile employees. The concerned officials must encourage employees to maintain an exemplary organizational culture and focus their efforts to the achievement of long-term goals. Bibliography Aswathappa, K. Human resource and personnel management: text and cases. New Delhi: Tata McGraw-Hill, 2005.  Brown, J. N. The complete guide to recruitment: A step-by-step approach to selecting, assessing and hiring the right people. Philadelphia, PA: Kogan Page, 2011.  Chiang, Chun-Fang. An expectancy theory model for hotel employee motivation: the moderating role of communication satisfaction. Thesis (Ph. D.)--Kansas State University, 2006. Durai, Pravin.. Human resource management. Chennai: Pearson, 2010 http://proquest.safaribooksonline.com/?fpi=9789332501393. Elearn Limited (Great Britain).. Recruitment and selection. Amsterdam: Elsevier/Pergamon, 2009. 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