Tahsin Kabir :
Bangladesh is known as a developing country throughout the world. Her population is increasing at an outrageous rate; unemployment problem is also intense. About 160 million people live in this country but most of them live under the poverty line. Now is the high time to think about this enormous human population, how successfully we can turn them into valuable resources and how properly we can manage them.
“Population is our valuable asset” is a stereotype which no one from top level management team of any organization would disagree with. We cannot even think of running a company without ensuring human resource management successfully. If we observe from Bangladesh perspective, Most of the multinational, banking sector and government- run institutions recently have involved in ensuring effective staffing practices to improve the productivity or skills of their workforce. However, unfortunately in private sector, most of the organizations including joint ventures, offshoring and buying house have still not involved with effective staffing practices due to lack of knowledge, lack of professionals, lack of plans and the list goes on. As a result, they are still in a growing level position.
Effective staffing, in the sense of putting right persons to right places, is an important part in every manager’s responsibilities. In Bangladesh, most of the multi-national organizations find it advantageous to establish a specialist division to provide an expert service dedicated to ensure human resource function being performed efficiently.
The degree of change that organizations are facing has never been greater and organizations must cope up with those changes at a much faster rate than in the past. In order to implement a successful business strategy to face these challenges, organizations, large or small, must ensure that they have right people in right places.
Bangladesh is still considered as a developing country because of the inefficient staffing practices by most of the organizations. One of the common issues people are facing in Bangladesh is that when recruiters post a job vacancy; it is observed that they are not cleared about job descriptions and job specifications. As a result, during interview session, candidates feel embarrassed because organization is searching for knowledge- which was not mentioned earlier in job specification. Another common issue is that recruiters are taking interviews for a specific position instead they are offering other positions. Moreover, even after confirming candidates for a position, they hire other candidates internally without even informing them. It is a total waste of time and money not only for organizations but also for candidates. These issues are happening because of recruiter’s lack of knowledge about organization’s objectives, what responsibilities one has to perform for the position and what kind of knowledge, skill and attitude (KSA) needs to be sustained on the position.
In Bangladesh, most of the people are not in right places within organizations. Question should be raised “why talents are treated like this”. A simple answer- They don’t have much knowledge on how to match employees KSA with a job position. In most of the cases, it is observed that they are not even clear about what organization wants and what the position demands. Due to their lack of knowledge, they fail to match a person’s knowledge, skill and attitude with their job positions.
These issues can be resolved with strategic staffing practices plans. But before we go for solutions, there should be some sort of training for HR persons to inform essential information about organization’s objectives, strategies; to cover other work related skills, and to train on how to maintain talents. The training could be conducted through in-house workshops, seminars or trainings.
Now, before organization goes for attracting candidates, first organization should plan to resolve some of its internal HR administrative issues. First of all, they must know about organization’s present objectives and strategies. Followed by, they must determine what kind of responsibilities need to perform for offered position and what sort of KSA organization needs to fulfill its objectives within the position.
Organization can determine these things by conducting job analysis. After determining job description and job specification, organization should design a proper selection method so that they can choose the right person.
If we fail to attract and onboard the right talents for organizations due to lack of effective staffing practices plans, employers will eventually move into hiring foreign talents to fill the skill gap which will be costly. In fact, this has already become a matter of concern. However, HR professionals of our country have somehow failed to realize the matter. HR’s responsibilities are not only to act as a service department but also to add values to make strategic decisions in terms of organizations. They must realize that an effective or strategic staffing plan can lead organization to success. We need to take these issues collectively and maturely, which our foreign competitors have done years ago.
(The writer is an MBA, North South University)
