Human Resources and Onboarding

Human Resource Management

Human resources departments play several important functions in a company. Key roles including the recruitment and retention of talent, administration of benefits, and adjudication of disputes. Increasingly, the human resources role is being viewed as strategic in nature, and can even be a source of competitive advantage in the information economy (Ray, 2016). This paper will outline some of these key roles for HR, and explain why they are important to exceling in the modern business environment.

The first role is with hiring/recruiting of employees. In today's business environment, knowledge is power. Workers are easy to find, but talented ones are scarce, and there is intense competition for quality workers. So one of the most important roles for HR is to continue to bring good people into organizations, as this will help the organization to remain competitive and innovative, if it has the best people (Mcgrath, 2008).

Onboarding new employees is another key role performed by HR. Once the company has found and hired talent, it needs to put that talent to work. One of the issues that many companies face is the time that it takes for a worker to get up to speed. When a worker takes a long time to get up to full capacity, that creates a drag on productivity. Moreover, that work needs to be done by somebody else, so there is further waste within the organization the longer the onboarding process is. Yet, shortcuts in onboarding are not desirable either. Companies have taken a variety of approaches to onboarding -- a rapidly-growing start-up might take more of a trial-by-fire approach, but other companies have formal training processes that are designed to onboard thoroughly and quickly, and make the process repeatable (Himelstein, 2014).

Performance appraisals are another component of human resources. Employees have job descriptions, and in many cases they also have performance targets. The performance appraisal is the means by which the employee is evaluated against the job description and performance targets. Performance appraisals are therefore a control mechanism in the workforce -- the organization has a better sense of who is doing what, and to what level, and it can apportion resources more effectively with that knowledge. Further, employees who are underperforming can have their performance improved through supplemental training.

At the heart of all of these things is the job description. Everything that needs to be done within the company should be included in somebody's job description. The descriptions form the basis for hiring -- you look for people to fill your unfilled roles. Training ensures that new hires are given the tools that they need to fill their roles. Further, performance appraisals are generally done against job descriptions. So the job description really is at the heart of all the other HR roles (Massad, 2005).