Applying business disciplines to HR
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/14754390980000971 |
| Published date | 12 August 2007 |
| Date | 12 August 2007 |
| Pages | 2-2 |
| Author | Sara Nolan |
| Subject Matter | HR & organizational behaviour |
Volume 6 Issue 4 May/June 2007
2
FROM THE EDITOR
,
CONTACT
Sara Nolan
E-mail: sara.nolan@melcrum.com
,
Applying business
disciplines to HR
The battle to win hearts and minds
Recruitment is a popular focus for cost-cutting
initiatives, with the application of new technologies
such as the internet identified several years ago as a
means of saving money. In the article E-recruitment
delivers return on investment for DML (page 8),
recruitment manager Andy Leftley explains how an
electronic hiring management system has resulted in
efficiencies and cost savings and has improved the
overall recruitment process and experience for both the
organization and candidates.
Innovation in recruitment is likely to grow in
importance, not purely to gain efficiencies but also to
combat the growing shortage of skills and talent. Jared
Larrabee from Deloitte, in the feature The virtuous
cycle of community involvement (page 24), believes
organizations will have to find ever-more innovative
ways to win job-seekers’ hearts and minds. He points to
community involvement programs as a means of
standing out from other recruiters in the battle for
talent. Tomorrow’s talent pool will naturally expect good
corporate citizenship from employers, and community
involvement programs can form a virtuous cycle in
which organizations, society and job-seekers all benefit.
Of course, HR departments putting forward this
concept as a recruitment tool will need to justify the
expenditure, but hopefully they will have defining the
cost-value relationship of intangibles down to a fine art
so that it is seen as a strategically clever move and not
“another costly idea from HR”.
There’s been an uneasy relationship between HR and
cost for some time. Restructuring, streamlining,
downsizing and redundancies have been commonplace
in recent years as the corporates of the Western world
gear up for a highly competitive, globalized
marketplace governed by the “survival of the fittest”
rule. HR has been at the heart of cost-cutting exercises,
from strategic input to transactional tasks. Perhaps as a
result of this key role played in cost reduction
initiatives, or due to the the intangible nature of many
HR services, or purely as a a continuation of the
streamlining trend, the HR department itself has been
vigorously called upon to define its own value and to
prove the efficiency of its operations.
This is one of the main themes of this issue of
Strategic HR Review. Nicholas Higgins of Valuentis
tackles the topic of Lean HR in the feature Putting
Lean HR into practice (page 16). He recommends a
highly analytical approach to mapping out HR
delivery, as key to identifying areas for improvement
and therefore moving the focus away from cost
reduction and on to operational excellence. HR should,
he argues, apply traditional business concepts, such as
operational excellence, Lean HR and Six Sigma, when
tackling the cost-value relationship.
Allan Boroughs and Jane Saunders of Orion
Partners examine a popular means of achieving Lean
HR operations in Shared services that work for the
business (page 28). While the shared service model is,
in theory, an accepted means of delivering cost-effective
and efficient HR programs, in practice implementation
can be poor and there are many examples of
transformations that have not worked. They use their
experience to identify the five success criteria for shared
service models that deliver real business benefits.
Similar to Higgins, they believe HR has to be modelled
as a business, and business disciplines applied.
Sara Nolan
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