Resourcing strategies and organizations

 Resourcing strategies.

Most large organizations employ human resource or personnel specialists to conduct or, at least, coordinate employee resourcing. This is a role that has long been regarded as part of the domain of personnel management and personnel textbooks conventionally describe resourcing as a passive, technical procedure - a matching of available candidates to the requirements of the organization. In fact, successful recruitment must be proactive. Organizations can take one of three actions to fulfil their employee resourcing:

1. Reallocate tasks between employees, so that existing staff take on more or different work. (...) The emphasis is on flexible working practices, requiring multi-skilled workers and sophisticated assessment and development programmes.

2. Reallocate people within the company. Traditionally, German and Japanese organizations have filled their supervisory and management posts from existing staff (...)

3. Recruit new staff from the external job market. Countries in the free-market tradition have focused most of their resourcing activities on bringing in people from outside the organization.

These are explained further on pages 348-350 (192-193 in the first edition) of Human Resource Management in a Business Context

 Types of resourcing strategy.  Resourcing is a dynamic process: the movement of human resources through an organization. In terms of systems theory this can be represented as:

* input

* throughput

* output

Businesses can assign people largely from existing staff or from the external job market. Companies that focus on internal supply are likely to view people as assets, carrying long-term value, rather than costs. This is in line with practice in social market and Japanese organizations. It also reflects the spirit of the Harvard model discussed in chapter 2. In essence the choice is between 'growing' or 'buying'. Needless to say, firms in free markets such as the UK and the USA have a tendency to 'buy' - and dispose of - employees as required.

This is elaborated and related to different types of organizational strategy on pages 349-350 (pages 193-194 in the first edition) of Human Resource Management in a Business Context.

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