Pre-recordered lectures – Personnel instruments

Lecture 1 – Staffing and HR Planning

Definition of staffing
Staffing is a process: organizations use multiple interconnected systems like planning, recruitment,
selection, retention system etc. What happens in one system automatically effects the other systems.
Changing one part of the staffing cycle and you change the entire cycle.
“The process of acquiring, deploying, and retaining a workforce of sufficient quantity and quality
to create positive impacts on the organization’s effectiveness.”

Different models of staffing

Staffing is a process that conceptually starts with
describing the mission and the goals of the
organization and the external environment: this one
could cause a change in the strategy. So, all these
aspects have influence on the organization strategy
and on the HR strategy.
This also influences the staffing policies, programs,
and specific activities in terms of planning and job
analysis, and so on.
Example:
Imagine a big retail firm that is based on physical stores and the sales drop down due to
development of online shopping. The firm develops new goal to focus on the online selling and to
develop a new web stores. More digital skills are needed, different types of employees with
different, digital skills. This also have effect on other elements of the process, also influenced by
what happens in the environment of the organization, the labor market. The job analysis is effected,
you need new employees:
- New specialized job functions: with high skilled people;
- Traineeship: hire employees that don’t have the skills yet but in the organization are trained.
If you choose one of them, would also depend on the environment on the labor market: how many
skilled employees are out there? Are these plenty? You may want to have the job function in which
you don’t have to train them anymore. But if these skills are very scares to get hold off, it would
make more sense to train them.
This have implications on the recruitment and selection: if you choose for more specialized job
functions, you probably need to have recruitment sources that are very targeted to these specific
types of functions, and selection tools aim to predict performance in this high level digital
functions. If you choose for traineeship you don’t need employees with very high skills yet and you
choose for more open resources, by which you can recruit more people with low skills, and you
need basic selection tools to check if they fulfill the basic selection criteria.
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HR Planning
Planning Is when an organization tries to forecast for the following years how much and which kind
of staff they will need, and they will try to forecast how much staff will they have, is available.
There may be a gap in the forecast demand of staff and the forecast availability, and this gap need to
be identified: then you can make action plans to fill this gap.
Forecast in demand/requirements
There are several ways to do this:
- Statistical: use (historical) data and make prognose for the future. We can do a ratio analysis,
a trend analysis, regression analysis. You can use historical data for the last couple of years:
id the trend continues, where will we end in 5 years?
- Judgmental: based on business plans. These arrive from top-down dictates, so business
plans.
Forecast supply/ availability
It’s possible to distinguish from statistical or judgmental, but also you can either try to predict the
supply outside your organization (external) or inside (internal) or both.
- External: you try to predict how many workers with specific skills will be available in the
coming years. It predicts quantity of available workers with specific KSAOs;
- Internal: within your organization you can try to predict the movements by looking at the
movements of the past (so basing on historical data). For example, it’s Markov’s analysis.
You can also proceed on a judgmental way: if you know the business plan you can make more
accurate considerations.

Planning: pro-active rather than reactive

You make yourself prepare for what’s going to happen.
Example: replacement and succession planning
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It’s not about seeking a replacement for someone who’s leaving. You know upfront that one day will
come when people leave. This will happen one day, but you don’t know how many people and
when. Proactive planning is preparing yourself for people leaving your organization: it’s important
to mapping out in advance the employees’ skills and knowledge and to see what vacancy they may
want to replace some day. You can also make a development plan for the deficiencies that may
come up one day. If you plan correctly, in your HR system you could have an idea of who could
replace the employee and whether this person needs more training and which kind.
Replacement planning
Identifying promotable employees by assessing current compentencies. Aggregate datacomposite
of talent availability.
You have a system in which it says about every employee what knowledge, vacancies he may be
promote to.
Succession planning
Process of anticipating and planning to replace an important employee (i.e. leader) by identifying
internal candidates before the current employee leaves.  Assess each promotable employee for
compentency gaps  Fill these gaps with training.
It’s about: how’s going to succeed to the leader. It goes with training a bit further than normal
replacement planning.
Often in practice: organizations do not engage in this, or at least not in all levels. They have no
planning and not succession planning and they just use posting or slotting. But if organizations do
engage in succession planning, then often they may also engage too much in it, decisions are made
very early on. Only 5-20% employees are considered eligible for succession programs. This is from
a study by Rink & Ryan, 2018:
Imagine that you had been working in a job that you have been enjoying for several years. (...) Your
leader will leave the current position in a few months time. Your team leader always evaluated your
work very positively. A few days later, your team leader announces the change in leadership
formally in a team meeting. Everybody is welcome to apply for the position.
1. As the leader approached you, you realize that you are one of the candidates. Clearly the
leader sees you as a potential successor for the role. On the whole, you are seen as a likely
future leader of the team. Your leader believes that you should potentially rise to a
leadership position.
2. As the leader did not approach you, you realize that you are not one of the candidates.
Clearly the leader does not see you as a potential successor for the role. On the whole, you
are seen as an unlikely future leader of the team. Your leader believes that you should
continue to work in your current position.”
From the graph: there’s quite a difference between people who were driven by ambition and
commitment. Those people who were not seen as successors have lower ambition levels and felt
less committed to the organization. This could be of the problems in engaging in a succession plan
early: this has negative consequences on the people who are not seen as successors.

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 - Leadership ambition, e.g., “I’d like to take on the challenge of acquiring a leadership
position”
- Commitment, e.g. “I’d feel emotionally attached to this organization”

Conclusion
- Staffing is a process in which all elements are interconnected
- Planning is forecasting demand and availability, identify gaps and fill them
- Planning is pro-active, not reactive
- Planning contributes to fluent and high quality staffing
- Succession programs: example of good planning. But there are some disadvantages.

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Lecture 2 – Diversity
Diversity has some consequences on staffing and planning. Why planning with diversity is
potentially important to begin with? Both for business and ethical reasons.
- 14,2% of top CEO in US are women. in nowadays society there are unequal chances fir
groups of people. For example, women are underrepresented.
- Non-western foreigners 3x as often unemployed
- 47% LGBT people experienced discrimination or harassment

Decision making
One important factor partially responsible for this is that people have biases.
- These biases are often functional: having them and acting on the is a human characteristic of
his evolvement and surviving mechanism. Sometimes is okay to draw fast conclusions based
on little evidence. So, biases can be functional;
- But they also interfere with objective decision making and in modern society a lot of
decisions are not substantial for our survival. When the decision is important, these biases
can become a handicap.
Biases are in our mind because during a lifetime we have been exposed to certain ideas. For
example, the director is always seen as male, and the supporters (nurses, assistants) are females. If
you’re repletely exposed to these stereotypes I does something to your brain, which starts to
associate males with leaders and females as subordinates.
How biases interfere with the organization?
Imagine that people have small gender bias: they’re 3% more likely to hire a man than a woman,
and it doesn’t sound that much. But a small bias can do a lot to the composition of an organization.
In this example, researchers simulated an organization with 8 levels (lower level is junior and the
highest is senior). The simulation started in a beginning situation where 50% of the employees were
women and 50% were men (orange is women). The researcher programmed that in each round
someone of the lower level will be promoted to a higher one. The choice was based on
performance, based on a score from 1 to 100. The researcher programmed a bias against women
performance of 1%. They run the simulation 20 times.

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Evidence of unconscious discrimination
How biases play out in real life?
People with foreign names are less likely to be invited to interview. People often are not aware of
their biases and automatically assume that certain people are not suitable for the job. It’s hard to
clock your stereotypes when you’re not aware of them.
Foreign name? Less likely to be invited for job interview: http://nos.nl/video/452463-onderzoek-
scp-discriminatie-bij-uitzendbureaus.html
Virtual reality experiments: distance to person who “looks Marrocan” Etc.

So, ethical reason for diversity planning

Diversity programs help to rectify unconscious discrimination. Globally, you can have two types of
diversity planning:
- Passive: it’s a non-discriminatory use of practices and procedures. In selection you can base
your choices strongly on your job analysis, which identifies what a job entails and what
skills are needed for this. You are less likely to use criteria there are irrelevant and allow
your biases. Also, structure interviews, less probability to ask questions that are biased. In
addition, the use of statistical ways of making decisions. This improves quality of decision
making in general!

- Active: you make more effort to attain and retain minorities. Sometimes we do this to
compensate the bias that might occur even in you engage in passive diversity planning or to
rectify decisions that have occurred in the past. Some possible actions:
-Job analysis (e.g., eliminate qualifications that may lead to less hiring of minorities and are
not absolutely necessary).
-Recruitment (e.g., active recruitment on schools that have a high percentage of minorities).
-Selection (e.g. use tests that have no adverse impact).
-Decision making (e.g. test-banding).
-Promotion and training practices.

Active diversity planning does not entail choosing a non-suitable minority over a suitable majority.
We’re must likely to hire an employee that performs well.
We do not say: We value diversity, but we primarly go for quality. You’re implicitly saying that
diversity becomes at the cost of quality and minorities are less qualified that majority groups.

Conclusion
- Ethical reasons for diversity planning: Decision making is influenced by implicit biases
- Passive diversity planning helps to make decision making less biased

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 - Active diversity planning even more so. Also: efforts to rectify distorted distributions

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Lecture 3 – Job analysis
Job analysis is finding out what a job is about: a process of studying jobs in order to gather and
analyze and sensitized job requirements and rewards. It’s about describing what a job is about and
it’s quite complicated.
There are three types of job analysis:
1. Job requirements job analysis: in the assignment 2. Describe, identify different tasks and
skills needed to the task in a job contest, there are different techniques to do this.
2. Competency based job analysis: the difference from the previous one is that this model
focuses more on general knowledge skills, across a range of jobs in the organization. Also
relating to the strategy of the organization. Look in the book.
3. Rewards based approach: what kind of rewarding outcomes one receives while performing
in a job.

What is the purpose of doing a job analysis?

The staffing processes come in relation to the job analysis: the recruitment, the selection etc.: you
always start from the job analysis, if you’re looking for staff, you want to know the skills candidates
should have. Also, should be base the selection on the job analysis? If you rain people in a certain
position in your organization, you can also use job analysis to find out what should be the main
result of the training. In addition, you can base the reward on the job description. So:
- Recruitment;
- Selection;
- Training;
- Performance appraisal;
- Compensation management.

Other uses could be: when you’re dealing with ineffective employees (they may fail a complete task
or engage in a work habits not conform)  it’s frustrating for both the employers and the
employees. It’s useful to assess if the job structure it’s still appropriate.
In other occasions, employees themselves make changes without the approval: they disregard,
avoiding a task they don’t like. Also, maybe they feel they don’t earn enough since all the
responsibilities and tasks. They ask the management to reassess the job description.

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Example: Administrative assistant
When you have defined specific tasks, you fill in the skills that are needed to do these. During the
selection, you ask which kind of skills we need to assess: What should we screen the CVs based on?
Is there a test we can use?
For employees that are already doing this job you may use the tasks description to appraisal their
performance, to see if they’re capable of the job of preparing graphs etc.

Job analysis: Global steps in assignment

It’s important to do this a structured way: in a job requirement matrix (page 161).
- Collecting information about the job:
- Formulate tasks statement: make clear what actually a person does in the job;
- Formulate task dimension and assign statements to dimension: in a way that is done in the
book.
- Infer the Knowledge Skills or Abilities from this.
- Determine time spent and importance: how important are the skills important for this task?

How to collect information?

- You can use information that is already existing: for example, o’net and job descriptions;
- Observation: in real life, you can observe what a person Is doing in a job: but not all jobs
have observable outcomes.
- Interviews: people who are doing this job or their managers;
- Questionnaires.
Example questionnaire for military jobs
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There are very detailed tasks already in there and people have to fill in about their experience. It
must be indicated how important the skills and personality traits are. It’s easier if you ask people
that are actually working in the same position, so you already know how to structure the
questionnaire.

Formulating task statements

After collecting information, you should formulate task statements:
- Activity: it’s important to be concrete, meaning that they should include the activity, the
object, the outcome, equipment or procedures used;
- Object: the customers who have questions.
- Outcome: should be specified, in this case to satisfy and retain the customer.
- Equipment, materials, tools or procedures used. In the case, only the phone.

Legal implications

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Job analysis or job description is important also for another reason: because of the legal
implications.
- Legitimacy of firing: if you have an employee that is misfunctioning and underperforming,
you may want to fire him, but is it legitimate? Are you allowed to fire this person? If a
person is fired for reasons that are irrelevant for the job, they may be have a illegal case.
- The way you describe a job has implications for either you provide equal opportunities: for
examples, people with disabilities. Maybe in a job tasks there are things that are impossible
for blind people. Are you allowed to turn down an applicant or turn down an employee
because he cannot perform certain parts of the job because of his situation?
It is all about essential functions:
“An organization must not discriminate against a qualified individual with a disability who can
perform the ‘essential functions’ of the job, with or without reasonable accommodations”
When a function is essential?
- Job exists to perform that function: if it’s about talking, for example a disc jockey.
- Limited number of employees available to skip the function. In a small office where
employees perform many different tasks, one task that everybody is performing is answering
the phone. So everybody need to speak well and answer the phone. This makes answering
the phone an essential function. But if you work in a large office where this task can be more
divided, then answering the phone could be less essential function.

Consequence for job-description

It’s important to stick to essential functions  when describing tasks, focus on outcomes (what is
the end, rather than how). At the same time, try to stay concrete (with essential functions).
Manually write programs  develop programs;
Ability to read technical manuals  ability to learn technical material.

Conclusion Job analysis

- It has many purposes.
- Job requirement or competency-based? Depends on organizational goals/strategies
- Collect, structure, and describe
- Several ways of collection
- Job description has legal consequences

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