Recruitment And Selection Into Specialty Training

Task 1 The briefing document must in the format of a report and properly referenced.

Task 2 Produce a document that describes suitable processes for recruiting staff to an on-line retailer. You are also required to highlight the advantages and disadvantages of running both a high street and an on-line retail business?

 

 

Introduction:

The main purpose of the report is to provide the learners with appropriate skills as well as knowledge that would enable one to be adequately effective in achieving proper employment. The report is based on the scenario of the firm Timbacourt which is a subsidiary of Premier Products. It is a retailer dealing in high-end fashion clothes both for men as well as women.

Task 1:

Recruitment, Selection & Training of Staff:

Recruitment refers to the procedure of identifying of an applicant that the firm needs at the current situation to employ him for a post that became vacant due to some reason. Once recruitment process has been accomplished, selection process is conducted to make a choice of the best applicant suitable to occupy the post (Yeh, 2003). When both recruitment and selection processes are completed, training is imparted to the chosen applicants and these processes ensure that the employees acquire necessary attitudes, skills, and knowledge to achieve organizational objectives. Recruitment may be conducted within a firm to fill a vacant post by either internal or external process (Ward and McKillop, 2010).

External recruitment – The procedure of external recruitment would make it possible for Timbacourt retail store to make choice from a wide pool of talents and also provide opportunities for bringing innovative experience as well as ideas into the business. External recruitment may prove to be expensive and may result in hiring of an ineffective applicant. Various steps exist that may define the nature of specific jobs for the purpose of recruitment.

All the concerned managers of every department must take adequate care in making the best selection of recruitment process. These are designed for creating a positive image towards applicants who can be potential employees, providing clear understanding of work and what would be expected of them, enhancing quality of applicant pool, and reducing risk of ineffective decision. Recruiting managers need to discuss their plans or strategies with human resource services to allow perfect guidance as well as support to get all processes run smoothly. It is to be highly considered and taken care of during the phase of shaping the contents of recruitment activity perfect for vacancy (Treven, 2003).

• Draft information may be used in announcing position involving brief description of the required work and preferences for qualifications of employees like specific training, skills, abilities and knowledge.
  
  
• The coordinator of employment would review such announcement draft to maintain consistency with required specifications.

If any selection technique is planned other than interview, it must be related directly to the key requirements of job and must be selected carefully, designed professionally, and applied properly for ensuring no existence of biasness within the selection process. Whenever required, help and support must be taken from the human resource department.

Selection of staffs for vacant positions would be based upon their qualifications required to fill a position. Benefits would be given to those contestants who are considered to be most qualified. The respective authority should document reasonably the hiring decisions for verifying the advantages imparted and ground for selection (Supplemental Material for Individual Influence on Model Selection, 2012). The applicants need to possess the least qualification as well as experience for the respective position. The method would be used in cases of recruitments, transfers, promotions, and reinstatements. The qualification as well as experience needed act as indicators of the required knowledge, abilities, and skills as presented through job evaluation results in successful performances. Specific set of formal education can be substituted for necessary experience in several positions.

In this context, three concepts may be mentioned of, namely job analysis, job description and job specification. Job analysis refers to the process of examining jobs for identifying vital requirements of jobs. This signifies the title of jobs, the employee responsible for the particular jobs, a concrete description of duties of to be performed by the employee (Snyder and Shahani-Denning, 2012). Job analysis would be useful for selecting employees from existing staffs or newly recruited staff. Job analysis also specifies the training needs of specific job, generates information to be used in making key decisions regarding materials to be used in the jobs, identify key risks, and many others. This job analysis may be conducted by the retail store by observing directly upon employees while at work, and also getting information from interviewing employees, or referring to training manuals.

Job description for Retail Managers:

All the managers engaged in the Timbacourt must be responsible for the on-going daily operations in departments. Their objectives must be to enhance profit while reducing costs. These managers need to ensure accurate promotions so that these are merchandized to the organizational standards, effective customer standards are achieved, and company staffs are well-versed upon the day’s target (Shim, Lusch and Goldsberry, 2002). Based on the size of the new store and the firm’s structure, all the managers may need to deal with marketing, human resource, information technology, logistics, finance, and customer service. The staffs at various departments must feel motivated to accomplish organizational objectives. They must not prioritize their personal objectives rather than organizational objectives. The staffs are required to perform their duties and deliver responsibilities in the most effective manner possible.

Some of the common tasks of all retail managers would be:

• Managing as well as motivating teams to enhance sales with efficiency
  
  
• Managing of stock levels by taking effective decisions on stock control
  
  
• Analyzing and forecasting sales
  
  
• Deal with staff issues like conducting interviews, appraisals of performances, and arranging for training as well as development (Sanchez-Bahillo et al., 2012)
  
  
• Ensuring customer service, quality standards, and health standards
  
  
• Respond to customer comments
  
  
• Organizing special displays, events and promotions
  
  
• To maintain updates on business performances, and other issues (Poon, 2012)
  
  
• Maintaining records of market trends in the particular sector with proper understanding of customer demands and competitions.
  
  
• Introducing changes for business innovation

Person specification for Retail Managers:

Person specification refers to the means of identifying qualifications, knowledge, experience, competencies, and attributes required by an applicant to ensure effective business conducts. Such a structure needs to be clear and precise within the recruitment process as conditions upon which most desirable applicants would be shortlisted as well as selected (Pain, 2013). The process requires special care in devising the structure to ensure that the specifications do not discriminate amidst individuals in an unlawful manner.

In case of Timbacourt, since the retail store aims at engaging into profitable activities, the human resource department of the firm needs to ensure effective planning person specification. The retail managers at Timbacourt are required to meet the standards of the following person specifications:

• The managers at all departments of Timbacourt must be highly efficient to deal with the day-to-day operations at the store (Miulescu, 2013).
  
  
• The managers must be effective enough to manage their team members and make them realize about the overall organizational objectives.
  
  
• The managers must assign suitable roles and responsibilities to each of their team members (Oparanma, 2011).
  
  
• The managers have the key responsibility to help the members realize the organizational objectives to achieve the desired profitability as well as effectiveness.
  
  
• The managers must maintain records of each of the members regarding their responsibilities, performance standards, and efficiency.
  
  
• Another key roles of retail managers at Timbacourt would be to motivate the team members to participate in the effective decision-making process within the store, and encourage them to take up increased responsibilities to achieve their personal goals along with organizational objectives.

Job description for Staffs:

Job description refers to the detailed account of the job including what all functions are to be performed, what procedures are to be followed, what all equipment or tools are to be used by the employees, and what time is required to accomplish the tasks. It sets out how an employee would fit into the firm (Miulescu, 2013). The job description for the staffs would present the list of processes or functions that the organizational members and staffs are required to perform and deliver. The job description would even state the procedures of the operations to enable the staffs to perform the tasks effectively. It would mention about the equipment to be used while performing the operations, and also the stipulated time within which the operations would be accomplished.

The staffs at Timbacourt would be managed by their respective managers at various departments. The staffs are required to take on the roles and responsibilities assigned to them by their departmental managers. The assigned task would be clearly demonstrated to them through the job description (Kim, 2014). It would provide them every detail of the assigned task with respective processes, required materials, equipment, tools, and stipulated time to perform the operations. the staffs need to keep in mind about the desired organizational objectives vision while performing for the tasks.

Training Plan for Managers:

As the Company aims at expanding itself in the United Kingdom with the launch of a retail clothing store, it is important for the entire store to realize the importance of developing its employee at all organizational levels. The departmental managers are responsible for the daily operations of the store and it is only with their support and innovative managerial skills that the store may successfully increase its customer base and sales (Miller, Biggart and Newton, 2013). In order to enable the organizational managers to enhance their competencies, all junior managers across the different departments must be trained adequately. Thus, a plan has to be formulated to conduct effective training sessions for the departmental managers (Gingerich, 2007).

Training of the managers may take place in two ways – on the job training and off the job training. On the job training may be conducted where managers would learn through work experience practically. On the other hand, off the job training would allow managers to learn by attending courses. In this case, the departmental managers may be imparted with apprenticeship training and effective coaching or mentoring. The store managers may be grouped into batches and on an alternative manner these batches may be trained by effective mentors and experienced professionals from internal or external sources.

Person specification for Staffs:

Person or job specification highlights mental as well as physical features of the applicant. In case of Timbacourt retailer, the staffs at all departments are required to abide by the responsibilities assigned to them by their managers. The staffs at various departments must feel motivated to accomplish organizational objectives (Furnham and Chamorro-Premuzic, 2010). They must not prioritize their personal objectives rather than organizational objectives. The staffs are required to perform their duties and deliver responsibilities in the most effective manner possible. The staffs need to participate effectively in the decision-making process of the management to direct the firm towards the path of increased profitability.

Task 2:

Methods of Selection of Staffs:

Selection of staffs for vacant positions would be based upon their qualifications required to fill a position. Benefits would be given to those contestants who are considered to be most qualified. The respective authority should document reasonably the hiring decisions for verifying the advantages imparted and ground for selection (Daily and Dalton, 2004). The applicants need to possess the least qualification as well as experience for the respective position. The method would be used in cases of recruitments, transfers, promotions, and reinstatements. The qualification as well as experience needed act as indicators of the required knowledge, abilities, and skills as presented through job evaluation results in successful performances. Specific set of formal education can be substituted for necessary experience in several positions (Duffin, 2013).

Prediction of performances of future job is quite a complex process considering that effective performances within any given job role would be affected by variables organizationally or individually. Thus, research states that selection decisions should not be isolated from human resource practices occurring before or after the process. The practice of diversity management is another important factor to be considered in decision-making process (Bulle, 2014). The firm may make use of a much more sophisticated selection process and not just relying upon only one source of information based on which decisions about suitability of applicants would be taken for any specific job scopes. Some of the effective selection approaches drawn by the firm are informal as well as unstructured interviews, conducted over telephone or even structured situational interviews, competency-related interviews, selection through assessment centers, and psychometric tests. The utilization of psychometric tests within the selection process would be perceived as an approach to ensure procedural justice considering that tests would be administered equally for every applicant (Broadbridge and Parsons, 2005). It needs to be considered the firm Timbacourt that any job can be performed by individuals in different manners or ways and can still be effective. Hence, a one-size selection approach should never be selected by the firm. No matter how complex the process of recruitment or selection be, it is always important for the firm to monitor systematically the results of the recruitment or selection policies as well as practices.

Recruitment Strategy:

The retail store may implement some of the key strategies in the recruitment procedure and these may be advertisements in local papers, through recruiting agencies or firms, special journals, corporate websites, speculative applications, employee referral procedure, etc. These strategies would enable the firm to attract potential applicants (Abuzeid, 2008).

Internet recruitment – with technological advancement, online recruitment process acts as a useful means to recruit by recruitment agencies or employers. The rate of online recruitment has increased ever since 1998 and is still believed to grow (Broadbridge, 2007). The retail store of Timbacourt may implement the strategy of online recruitment of potential employees. This would reduce the overall costs of recruitment of the firm. The benefits not only reduces the overall costs, but it also enable the firm to reach a wide pool of applicants, reducing recruitment cycle, reduction of tedious paper works in the recruitment procedure. Online recruitment may provide an increased flexibility for applicants, thereby matching job-seeking nature of the labor market. Besides, online recruitment may create effective opportunities for firms to apply few pre-selection tests or tools, thereby enhancing the likelihood of effective match amidst applicants as well as job vacancies (Alstete, 2006).

Employee referral schemes – this technique of employee referral scheme has been becoming increasingly popular in practice. In this technique, existing employees refer or suggest potential applicants from their own social networks. In the present situation, majority organizations use this technique as it is considered to be one of the most reliable methods. The benefits of this technique include reduced recruitment expense and also allowing applicants to acquire an increased realistic job preview (Amin and Islam, n.d.). Besides, the willingness of present employees to suggest firms to others is utilized as an effective measure of commitment of firms within increased-performance workplaces.

Recruitment may be conducted within a firm to fill a vacant post by either internal or external process.

External recruitment – The procedure of external recruitment would make it possible for Timbacourt retail store to make choice from a wide pool of talents and also provide opportunities for bringing innovative experience as well as ideas into the business.

All the concerned managers of every department must take adequate care in making the best selection of recruitment process. These are designed for creating a positive image towards applicants who can be potential employees, providing clear understanding of work and what would be expected of them, enhancing quality of applicant pool, and reducing risk of ineffective decision (Anu, 2011). Recruiting managers need to discuss their plans or strategies with human resource services to allow perfect guidance as well as support to get all processes run smoothly. It is to be highly considered and taken care of during the phase of shaping the contents of recruitment activity perfect for vacancy.

Impact of Timbacourt’s on-line business in relation to high street retail business:

The online business firms would be increasingly motivated with the data of past success in the commerce of online business. Previously, customer had preferred reaching to the retailer shops to select products out of many options, and along with the technological advancements, the concept of online business had emerged. Even this innovative concept of online business is yet a new scope of investments (Augustin et al., 2014). The following graph would reflect the growing popularity on online conducts of business and increasing sales and revenues of the firm.

Source: (Bauer, 2014)

Online retail business has witnessed tremendous growth and success in the recent years. The traditional means have been well replaced by the advanced technology. Customers prefer taking less pain and effort to go up to the retail store to buy their desired products. Rather, they prefer buying those products sitting back at home by means of online purchase systems. The venture of Timbacourt to conduct business online would have greater impacts on customer satisfaction than that of its retail store at high street. The online processes would provide accessibility to increased customer base and this would allow more and more customers to become loyal customers of the brands (Broadbridge, 2002). With much ease and convenience, customers would be able to purchase products from out of numerous product options. The firm can also utilize internet-based process to track as well as manage applications of candidates that would provide considerable benefits to Timbacourt in terms of cost, efficiency, and capability for monitoring all recruitment actions. The modern technique of recruitment through online portal would replace all drawbacks of the traditional recruitment system such as lack of innovation to acquire the most efficient and suitable candidates for the desired post within the firm.

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