Human Resource Management for Employee Training and Retention in the Modern World

The modern business organization devotes much more effort and coordination to the entire spectrum of human resource management (HRM) processes than its predecessor. Previously, even if all of the individual functions and responsibilities of HRM were administrated by the same department, they remained largely separate initiatives. Recruitment was not coordinated with other aspects of HRM, let alone with other departments outside of HRM, beyond the initial request or notification to HRM that new personnel were required. New hire training was primarily organized and delivered within individual business units rather than by the organization in any uniform way; and the notion of "organizational culture" rarely played any role in that training. Legal training was limited to the department of legal counsel and higher-level management, or provided otherwise, only after being necessitated by problems after they had already become manifest. Organizations made little effort and had few means of gauging the relative satisfaction of their employees beyond objective performance measures, and any effort to maximize the potential of existing personnel to recruit new talent was limited to the occasional announcement within individual business units.

Today, contemporary business organizations recognize the importance of HRM functions in the optimal selection, hiring, and training of employees. Typically, they maintain fully-integrated HRM functions that begin before job opening announcements are even posted and that continue through new-hire training, employee satisfaction assessments, and exit interviews.

The Integrated Approach to HRM

Job Description and Recruitment

The modern business environment is much more competitive than it was before, in many industries, particularly since the recent economic recessions in the United States and globally. Competition for the best talent is intense and business organizations have recognized that maintaining high employee retention rates is a key element of profitable operations, mainly by virtue of the real costs of employee turnover (Robbins & Judge, 2009). Every time that the organization loses an employee, it suffers a reduction in output from the time of departure until a replacement is hired, trained, and operating at the same capacity as the departed employee (Russell-Whalling, 2008). There are related costs to the organization associated with recruitment, interviewing,...

If the replacement should fail to perform at an acceptable level, those costs continue to mount until a suitable replacement can be hired, trained, and retained. The integrated approach to HRM was developed precisely to reduce turnover, by improving the ability of modern business organizations recruit and hire the right individual for every job and then provide the necessary training and support to maximize tenure (Russell-Whalling, 2008).
Generally, integrated HRM begins with better coordination between operational managers within departments seeking to add personnel and HRM representatives (George & Jones, 2008). The purpose of that coordination is to ensure that the HRM personnel responsible for publishing the job opening announcement understand and describe the requirements and nature of the position well enough to help limit potential respondents to those prospective new hires who will have the necessary qualifications, temperament, and desire to succeed within the organization and maintain a ling enough tenure to defray the cost associated with their hiring (George & Jones, 2008). In that regard, one of the most important elements of that process from the perspective of employee retention is the effort to identify the potential compatibility between prospective new hires and the existing organizational social culture (Russell-Whalling, 2008).

More specifically, modern business organizations understand that incompatibility between employees and organizational culture is significant source of employee dissatisfaction and, ultimately, turnover, apart from performance issues. By incorporating organizational cultural compatibility issues into the recruitment and interview process, HRM personnel can greatly reduce the rate of turnover by assessing the likely level of employee-organizational compatibility before the organization actually commits to hiring any prospective employee (Russell-Whalling, 2008).

New Social Media Technologies

Modern HRM approaches also recognize the value of social media (Leader-Chivee, Hamilton, & Cowan, 2008; Robbins & Judge, 2009). Since it has become so common for employees to maintain social media profiles, business organizations have begun incorporating those avenues into their online presence in several ways. They maintain corporate social media accounts that are employee-friendly and that promote the values…