Q.14. Write short note on manpower planning. (AKTU. 2010 - 11)
Ans. Manpower Planning: -
People represent a most important resource to a business or industrial firm. Thus the terms selection and placement designate separate phases in the ever-important area of manpower planning. The trends toward automation and computerization are making the selection and placement of people more important rather than less important. Despite any or all technological advances, profits resulting from a company’s efficient operation require the expeditious use of manpower via correct selection and placement.
Selection, as the name implies, involves picking for hire a subset of workers from the total set (population) of workers available for hire at any given moment in time.
Man Power Allocation Process
Efficient selection is therefore a nonrandom process, insofar as those selected have been chosen on the assumption ‘that they are more apt to make “better” employees than those who have been rejected. The task of the industrial psychologist is to make certain that the assumption is indeed a valid one as a result of using objective and scientific procedures and instruments rather than subjective and biased judgments. An equally critical problem is that of assigning the new hires to the jobs available. Placement, in its simplest form, asks. “given the hiring of N men to fill N different job vacancies, which man should be put on which job?” As might be suspected, in actual practice the processes of selecting and placing employees often merge into a single process. Figure shows in highly simplified form the general process of manpower allocation.
Q.15. What is the role in recruitment and selection process. (AKTU. 2009 - 10)
Ans. The methods used to select employees should tie in directly with the results of the job analysis. In other words, every essential knowledge, skill, and ability identified in the job analysis that is needed on the first day of the job should be tested, and every test must somehow relate to the job analysis. For example, if a job analysis reveals that an office manager types correspondence and proofreads reports to ensure that the reports are grammatically correct, then the battery of selection tests might include a typing test and a grammar test.
Recuitment: -
An important step in selecting employees is recruitment: attracting people with the right qualifications (as determined in the job analysis) to apply for the job. The first decision is whether to promote someone from within the organization (internal recruitment) or to hire someone from outside the organization (external recruitment).
Organizations such as AT&T and Norfolk and Southern Railroad first advertise employment openings for two weeks to current employees. If no qualified applicants are found, the organizations then advertise outside.
To enhance employee morale and motivation, it is often good to give current employees an advantage in obtaining new internal positions. In fact, an examination of the 2005 rankings of the 25 Best Small Companies to Work for in America and the 25 Best Medium Companies to Work for in America indicates that these companies fill more than 20% of their openings with internal promotions rather than external hires.
Internal promotions can be a great source of motivation, but if an organization always promotes employees from within, it runs the risk of having a stale workforce that is devoid of the many ideas that new employees bring with them from their previous employment settings. Heavy reliance on internal sources is thought to perpetuate the racial, gender, and age composition of the workforce. Thus, a balance between promoting current employees and hiring outside applicants is needed.
The recruitment process was successful, an organization will have several applicants from which to choose. At this point, many techniques can be used to select the best person from this pool of applicants. Effective employee selection systems share three characteristics: They are valid, reduce the chance of a legal challenge, and are cost—effective. A valid selection test is one that is based on a job analysis (content validity), predicts work-related behavior (criterion validity), and measures the construct it purports to measure (construct validity). Selection tests will reduce the chance of a legal challenge if their content appears to be job related (face validity), the questions don’t invade an applicant’s privacy, and adverse impact is minimized. Ideal selection tests are also cost-effective in terms of the costs to purchase or create, to administer, and to score.
