Summary of all lectures & articles of the course Personnel Instruments (EBM014A05). It's a mandatory course of the MSc HRM that is offered by the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen (RUG) / University of Groningen.
On-campus lecture 1 – Introduction & Activities on HR planning
This course is about how things SHOULD be done, rather than how they ARE done
How to optimize fitting the right person to the right job within the context of an organization?
• HR planning
• Job analysis
• Recruitment
• Screening
• Selection decisions
• Performance management
• Retention management
All chapters of book are exam material, except for chapters 2/12/13 (and all parts about legal issues)
Requirements vs. availability forecasting
• Availability forecast: also either statistical or judgmental
• Don’t mix them up! One is really about forecasting your NEEDS in the future, and the other is about
expectations of AVAILABILITY in the future
Pre-recorded lecture 1 – Staffing & HR planning
Staffing = the process of acquiring, deploying, and retaining a workforce of sufficient quantity and quality
to create positive impacts on the organization’s effectiveness
Model of staffing:
How can staffing work? → how goals/external environment influence the elements of staffing process:
Example: growth in online selling → improve online web shop instead of investing in the physical stores → more technological
skills needed → job analysis → recruitment & selection
,HR planning = trying to forecast the demand of staff & the availability of staff and identify the gap
between those two (and make action plans to overcome the gap)
• Forecast demand/requirements
- Statistical: use (historical) data and make prognoses for the future
1) Ratio analysis
2) Trend analysis
3) Regression analysis
- Judgmental: based on business plans
Example: when the board of a firm decides to plan to produce/sell another type of product in the future (on top of the
products they already sell) → then the question would be ‘what would we need in terms of employees to retain this?’
• Forecast supply/availability
- Statistical:
External: predict quantity of available workers with specific KSAOs
Internal: based on movements within the organization (e.g. Markov analysis)
- Judgmental: based on business plans (more applicable for internal prediction)
Planning: pro-active rather than reactive
• Make yourself prepared for what is going to happen
➔ Example: Replacement and succession planning
Not about seeking a replacer for someone who is leaving, you know upfront that a day will come on which people will
leave the organization → you only don’t know which people and when. Proactive planning = preparing yourself for
people leaving. Planning entails mapping out in advance which individuals have which skills/knowledge and to see what
vacancies need to be replaced one day. If a person leaves, you can almost directly by looking in your HR system who
in your workforce could actually replace this person and whether this person needs more training and if so, what kind
• Replacement planning = identifying promotable employees by assessing current competencies
- Aggregate data → composite of talent availability
• 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 competency gaps
- Fill these gaps with training
➔ Often in practice: no planning (or only succession planning) – just ‘posting or slotting’ (lecture next
week)
If there is planning: decisions made early on (only 5-20% considered eligible for succession
programs)
Study Rink & Ryan (2018)
, ➔ First group of people was seen as ‘successor’. Second group was seen as ‘non-successor’.
➔ Then they measured leadership ambition & commitment
➔ Results: quite a difference between people who read that they were seen as successor
compared who were not seen as a successor. People who were not seen as successor had
lower ambition to become a leader, but also felt lower commitment towards the organization
➔ Possible disadvantage of engaging the succession programs (employees can get the feeling of
being seen as a successor or non-successor quite early on in their jobs at an organization)
Conclusion staffing & HR planning:
• Staffing is a process in which all elements are interconnected
• Planning is forecasting demand and availability, identify gaps and filling 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
On-campus lecture 2 – Diversity & Job Analysis
Bias in ‘potential ratings (Benson, Li & Shu, 2023)
➔ Analysed 29809 management-track employees in large retail chain that used ‘9 box grid’
➔ Women receive high performance ratings, but lower potential ratings
Circumstances that facilitate biased to affect decisions:
• Ambiguity
• No structure in procedures
• Decision making more intuitive-based than statistical
Standardizing procedures → making higher quality decisions = less biased decisions
Affirmative action is not necessarily preferential treatment!!
➔ Examples of preferential treatment:
open up a vacancy only for women
provide mentoring especially for ethnic minorities
Job descriptions:
• Be concrete (Activity, Object, Outcome, Tools/Procedures)
➔ “On the phone, answer questions of customers with questions or complaints in order to satisfy
and retain them”
Pre-recorded lecture 2 – Diversity
Why is planning for diversity important? Business reasons, but also ethical reasons
• Ethical reasons:
- There still seem to be unequal chances for different groups of people
14,2% of top CEO in US are women
Non-western foreigners 3x as often unemployed
47% LGBTQ people experienced discrimination or harassment
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