Human Resource

Management

Code No 5563
Allama Iqbal Open
University
COL MBA

Muhammad Moqeem Khan

Roll #AD 593516
 QUESTION NO. 1

How the concept of HRM was originated? What are the distinguishing characteristics of
Human Resource Management from Personnel Management?

Human Resource Management (HRM), is a process of bringing people and

organization together so that the goals of each are met. It is that part of the
management process which is concerned with the management of human resources in
an organization. It tries to secure the best from people by winning the whole hearted
cooperation... 

HRM may be defined as the art of procuring, developing and maintaining competent
workforce to achieve the goals of an organization in a effective and efficient manner.

Evolution of the concept of HRM

The early part of the century saw a concern for improved efficiency through careful
design of work. During the middle part of the century emphasis shifted to the availability
of managerial personnel and employees productivity. Recent decades have focused on
the demand for technical personnel responses to new legislation and governmental
regulations increased concern for the quality of working life, total quality management
and a renewed emphasis on productivity. Let us look into these trends more closely by
examining the transformation of personnel function from one stage to another in
chronological sequences.

Evolution of the Personnel Function

The commodity concept:

Labor was regarded as a commodity to be bought and sold. Wages were based on
demand and supply. Government did very little to protect workers.

The Factor of Production concept:

Labor is like any other factor of production, viz., money materials land etc. Workers are
like machine tools.
The Good will concept:

Welfare measures like safety first aid, lunch room, rest room will have a positive impact
on worker’s productivity.

The Paternalistic Concept / Paternalism

Management must assume a fatherly and protective attitude towards employees.

Paternalism does not mean merely providing benefits but it means satisfying various
needs of the employees as parents meet the requirements of he children.

The Humanitarian concept:

To improve productivity, physical social and psychological needs of workers must be

met. As Mayo and others stated, money is less a factor in determining output than
group standards group incentives and security. The organization is a social system that
has both economic and social dimensions.

The Human Resources concept:

Employees are the most valuable assets of an organization. There should be a concise
effort to realize organizational goals by satisfying needs and aspirations of employees.

The Emerging concept

Employees should be accepted as partners in the progress of a company. They should

have a feeling that the organization is their own. To this end managers must offer better
quality of working life and offer opportunities to people to exploit their potential fully. The
focus should be on Human Resource Development.

History of HRM

Organizations have many operational functions. HRD is one of the functions that is
engaging with the tasks of an organization. In early 70 s there was no division called as
Human Resource Department or Division. By that time there was only a division called
"Personnel" engaged with the labor related in the organization.
Personnel Management was introduced by the end of 19th century. At that time, this
was focused on the welfare of labors in the organizations. According to the tasks they
have done, the officers at Personnel Department was called as "Welfare Officers". The
special thing was, the employee welfare tasks were done by women at that time.
During the period of 1914-1939, many organizations has showed a quick growth and
quick changes in needs and wants of the operations. Therefore the tasks done by
women shifted to the men's, because of the complexity of tasks. These officers has
called as "Labor managers" at that time.

After Second World War, during the period 1945 - 1979, this has grown up and changed
to "Personnel Management", and Personnel Management was focus basically on
employee administration and the legislation.

At late 70 s the economic of the world changed gradually and organizations started to

consider labors work as an important resource. At the decade of 80 the concept of
"Human Resource Management" was started and then it has shown growth gradually in
decade of 1990. Finally the tasks and operations of personnel management was shifted
to the Human Resource Management and it is functioning now in broad way in the
organizations than Personnel Management.

Distinguish between Personal Management and HRM

Some experts assert that there is no difference between human

resources and personnel management. They state that the two terms can be used
interchangeably, with no difference in meaning. In fact, the terms are often used
interchangeably in help-wanted ads and job descriptions.

For those who recognize a difference between personnel management and human

resources, the difference can be described as philosophical. Personnel management is
more administrative in nature, dealing with payroll, complying withemployment law, and
handling related tasks. Human resources, on the other hand, is responsible for
managing a workforce as one of the primary resources that contributes to the success
of an organization.

When a difference between personnel management and human resources is

recognized, human resources is described as much broader in scope than personnel
management. Human resources is said to incorporate and develop personnel
management tasks, while seeking to create and develop teams of workers for the
benefit of the organization. A primary goal of human resources is to enable employees
to work to a maximum level of efficiency.

Personnel management can include administrative tasks that are both traditional and
routine. It can be described as reactive, providing a response to demands and concerns
as they are presented. By contrast, human resources involves ongoing strategies to
manage and develop an organization's workforce. It is proactive, as it involves the
continuous development of functions and policies for the purposes of improving a
company’s workforce.

Personnel management is often considered an independent function of an organization.

Human resource management, on the other hand, tends to be an integral part of overall
company function. Personnel management is typically the sole responsibility of an
organization’s personnel department. With human resources, all of an organization’s
managers are often involved in some manner, and a chief goal may be to have
managers of various departments develop the skills necessary to handle personnel-
related tasks.

As far as motivators are concerned, personnel management typically seeks to motivate

employees with such things as compensation, bonuses, rewards, and the simplification
of work responsibilities. From the personnel management point of view, employee
satisfaction provides the motivation necessary to improve job performance. The
opposite is true of human resources. Human resource management holds that improved
performance leads to employee satisfaction. With human resources, work groups,
effective strategies for meeting challenges, and job creativity are seen as the primary
motivators.
Q2: Explain key Factors under Strategic and Political Prospective on Human
Resource Management?

Critics have argued that the field of human resource management (HRM) lacks a
coherent theoretical framework. This article attempts to further the theoretical
development of SHRM through discussing six theoretical models (behavioral
perspective, cybernetic models, agency/transaction cost theory, resource-based view of
the firm, power/resource dependence models, and institutional theory) that are
useful for understanding both strategic and non-strategic determinants of HR practices.
Finally, the implications of a stronger theoretical approach to SHRM research and
practice are discussed.
Introduction:
The past decade has seen an increasing interest in the "strategic management" of
organizations in the United States. Numerous models of strategic management have
been proposed (e.g., Hofer & Schendel, 1978; Miles Snow, 1978; Porter,
1980). This interest in strategic management has resulted in various organizational
functions becoming more concerned with their role in the strategic management
process. The Human Resource Management (HRM) field has similarly sought to
become integrated into the strategic management process through the development of
a new discipline referred to as Strategic Human Resource Management (SHRM).
This field of study has produced a number of conceptual and practitioner-oriented
articles proposing the particular human resource (HR) practices that would be
associated with various business strategies (Miles & Snow, 1984; Schuler & Jackson,
1987; Wils & Dyer, 1984). In addition, recent research has begun to examine the
determinants of HR practices from a strategic perspective (Dean & Snell, 1991;
Jackson, Schuler & Rivero, 1989; Snell, in press).
Given the relative infancy of this field of study, two deficiencies in this literature need to
be addressed before significant progress can be made. First, at present there is no
clear agreement regarding the delineation of the field of strategic human resource
management (SHRM), particularly with regard to its definition. Thus, it has been difficult
to differentiate between HRM and SHRM. Second, until recently there has been little in
the way of strong theoretical models to aid in understanding both the role of HRM in
organizations and the determinants of various HR practices. Similarly, without a strong
theoretical foundation for understanding the determinants of HR practices, it is difficult
to distinguish between HRM and SHRM.
Thus, the purpose of this article is to provide a foundation to guide future SHRM
research and practice by (a) clearly defining SHRM, distinct from HRM, and (b)
reviewing alternative theoretical frameworks that have and can be applied to help
explain the role of SHRM in strategic management. In order to accomplish this task, we
will first review the components of theory construction and its importance to the SHRM
research process. In the context of theory construction, we offer a specific definition of
the construct of SHRM, distinguishing it from HRM. We will then present a variety of
theoretical perspectives that may provide the necessary foundation for understanding
both the strategic and non-strategic determinants of HR practices and thus enable
researchers to take a strategic approach to HRM. Finally, we will discuss the
implications of the presence or absence of a strong theoretical foundation for the field of
SHRM.
The Role of Theory in SHRM
According to Dubin (1976), theory is "the attempt ... to model some aspect of the
empirical world," (26). Theories, if accurate, fulfill the objectives of prediction knowledge
of the outcome) and understanding (knowledge of the process) regarding the
relationships among the variables of interest. Thus, a good theory enables one to both
predict what will happen given a set of values for certain variables, and to understand
why this predicted value should result.
Although the primary goals of theorist-researchers and practitioners may differ (Dubin,
1976), a strong theoretical model has great value to both. Practitioners are primarily
concerned with the accuracy of prediction of a theoretical model in order to guide their
decision making; thus, an accurate theoretical model allows for better decision making
in conditions of uncertainty. Theorist-researchers, on the other hand, have greater
concern for understanding the why behind the prediction. For them, a well developed
theoretical model allows for testing of the model and, based on these tests, revision of
the model to increase its accuracy.
Due to the applied nature of SHRM, it is exceedingly important that the field develop or
use theoretical models that allow for both predicting and understanding the effects of
HR practices on organizational functioning. However, until very recently, one of the
most glaring inadequacies of SHRM was the lack of a strong theoretical basis for
viewing the HRM function (Mahoney & Deckop, 1986) within the larger organization.
In a call for HRM research to be grounded in the organizational context, Zedeck and
Cascio (1984) stated "HRM issues are part of an open system, and research is
theoretically bankrupt unless placed in the broader context of organizations," (463).
Similarly, Dyer's (1985) review of SHRM research pointed out that the field lacked a
strong theoretical foundation. He stated with regard to the dependent variables of
SHRM research, that it would be helpful to "have a fully articulated theory of personnel
and human resource management on which to draw," (10). In fact, in his discussion of
the criteria for evaluating theory, Bacharach (1989) noted SHRM research as one
glaring example of the lack of theory. He specifically pointed to this area as one which is
characterized by descriptive typologies, rather than good theory that helps us to
understand the why, how, and when of relationships between business strategy and
HRM practices.
The political perspective holds that HRM practices reflect the distributionof power in an
organization. For example, having an extensive set of HRMpractices implies a powerful
personnel department upon which others mustdepend when making personnel-related
decisions (Osterman 1984; Pfeffer andCohen 1984). But existence of other powerful
groups-such as unions orcompetitors who minimize their labor costs-may act to
countervail orsuppress the expression of the personnel department's wishes (Doeringer
andPiore 1971).

A political economy approach to explaining the existence of different human resource

strategies is developed in this article - in short: a political personnel economy. The
starting point is a critical analysis of the abstinence of politics and power and the
resulting explanation deficiencies of traditional microeconomic approaches and of the
transactions cost theory. The Marxian labour process theories also discussed in this
article, while certainly "political", primarily exhibit problems related to the theory of action
as a foundation. A micro-analytical theory of action-based version of a political economy
approach is therefore outlined and applied to the explanation of different human
resource management strategies.

1. Objective and approach

What are the reasons behind the different human resource management strategies
human resource management strategies understood as patterns of action for "dealing
with" the human resources or the work force of an organization? Why do we on one
hand have human resource management strategies, where the majority of employees
have a long-term employment contract with the organization (up to a "life-long"
employment guarantee), and where good working and wage conditions prevail, while on
the other hand there are certain strategies that are characterized primarily by very short-
term employment contracts and are frequently associated with poor working conditions
and relatively low wages? Economic approaches to an explanation trace the origin of
the different human resource management strategies back to the actors' primarily the
employers' - aspirations for efficiency. Often neglected here are the differences in power
between the employer and employee, but also other political aspects of the exchange
between "capital" and "labour". In this article, I suggest a Political Economy Perspective
as an explanatory approach (see also Nienhuser 2002). For this approach, I resort
mainly to considerations of power and exchange theory that exhibit parallels to
microeconomic approaches, in particular from the realm of institutional economics, but I
also pull from thoughts from the neo-Marxian labour process concepts.
Different opinions from experts and divisional managers, however it is subjective.

This method is being used more and more by small and medium organizations as it is
rather cheap and does not require much technology
Population growth. Organization operating in less stable environments ( e.g., a hospital
in an area experiencing explosive growth and change) are more likely to rely on a
judgmental approach.

Ratio analysis is the process of determining future HR demand by computing an exact

ratio between the specific business factor and the number of employees needed. It thus
provides a more precise estimate than trend analysis. For instance the demand for
professors at a
Student’s enrolls in the class. Consequently the 20:1 ratio would no longer apply.
The university would now be able to function with fewer professors or at least many
students per professor.
Employees will be needed to meet this demand. One drawback of this approach is the
possibility of bias. Some sales personnel may purposely underestimate product
demands so they will look good when their own sales exceed the forecasts. Other may
overestimate demand because they are overly optimistic about their potential.
Predictions are partially based on past mobility trends (e.g., turnover and promotions
rates). The organization also should consider any plans for mergers, acquisitions, unit
 or division divestitures, layoffs, retrenchments and

Q4: write a detailed note on four different approaches to job design that affect the
degree of specialization and the psychological dimensions of work?

Job design is also know as Job redesign is a task-technology related approach that
aims at making changes in the work process of the groups of the employees. It involves
a well planned re-organization of a job and focuses to improve employee motivation,
commitment, performance, job satisfaction etc. 

There are different approaches to job design and they are as follows:

1) Job Enrichment

2) Job Engineering

3) Job rotation

4) Job Enlargement

5) Socio-technical System

Job Enrichment:

Job enrichment is an attempt to motivate employees by giving them the opportunity to

use the range of their abilities. It is an idea that was developed by the
American psychologist Frederick Hertzberg in the 1950s. It can be contrasted to job
enlargement which simply increases the number of tasks without changing the
challenge. As such job enrichment has been described as 'vertical loading' of a job,
while job enlargement is 'horizontal loading'. An enriched job should ideally contain:

 A range of tasks and challenges of varying difficulties (Physical or Mental)

 A complete unit of work - a meaningful task

 Feedback, encouragement and communication

Techniques

Job enrichment, as a managerial activity includes a three steps technique

1. Turn employees' effort into performance:

 Ensuring that objectives are well-defined and understood by everyone. The

overall corporate mission statement should be communicated to all. Individual's
goals should also be clear. Each employee should know exactly how he/she fits into
the overall process and be aware of how important their contributions are to the
organization and its customers.
 Providing adequate resources for each employee to perform well. This includes
support functions like information technology, communication technology, and
personnel training and development.
 Creating a supportive corporate culture. This includes peer support networks,
supportive management, and removing elements that foster mistrust and politicking.
 Free flow of information. Eliminate secrecy.
 Provide enough freedom to facilitate job excellence. Encourage and reward
employee initiative. Flextime or compressed hours could be offered.
 Provide adequate recognition, appreciation, and other motivators.
 Provide skill improvement opportunities. This could include paid education at
universities or on the job training.
 Provide job variety. This can be done by job sharing or job rotation programmes.
 It may be necessary to re-engineer the job process. This could involve
redesigning the physical facility, redesign processes, change technologies,
simplification of procedures, elimination of repetitiveness, redesigning authority
structures.
2. Link employees performance directly to reward

 Clear definition of the reward is a must

 Explanation of the link between performance and reward is important
 Make sure the employee gets the right reward if performs well
 If reward is not given, explanation is needed
3. Make sure the employee wants the reward. How to find out?

 Ask them
 Use surveys( checklist, listing, questions)
Job Rotation:
Job rotation is an approach to management development where an individual is moved
through a schedule of assignments designed to give him or her a breadth of exposure to
the entire operation.

Job rotation is also practiced to allow qualified employees to gain more insights into the
processes of a company, and to reduce boredom and increase job satisfaction through
job variation.

The term job rotation can also mean the scheduled exchange of persons in offices,
especially in public offices, prior to the end of incumbency or the legislative period. This
has been practiced by the German green party for some time but has been
discontinued.

At the senior management levels, job rotation - frequently referred to as management

rotation, is tightly linked with succession planning - developing a pool of people capable
of stepping into an existing job. Here the goal is to provide learning experiences which
facilitate changes in thinking and perspective equivalent to the "horizon" of the level of
the succession planning.

For lower management levels job rotation has normally one of two purposes: promo
ability or skill enhancement.

In many cases senior managers seem unwilling to risk instability in their units by moving
qualified people from jobs where the lower level manager is being successful and
reflecting positively on the actions of the senior manager.

Many military jobs use the job rotation strategy to allow the soldiers to develop a wider
range of experiences, and an exposure to the different jobs of an occupation.
Job enlargement
Job enlargement means increasing the scope of a job through extending the range of its
job duties and responsibilities. This contradicts the principles of specialisation and
the division of labour whereby work is divided into small units, each of which is
performed repetitively by an individual worker. Some motivational theories suggest that
the boredom and alienation caused by the division of labour can actually cause
efficiency to fall. Thus, job enlargement seeks to motivate workers through reversing the
process of specialisation. A typical approach might be to replace assembly lines with
modular work; instead of an employee repeating the same step on each product, they
perform several tasks on a single item. In order for employees to be provided with Job
Enlargement they will need to be retrained in new fields which can prove to be a lengthy
process. However results have shown that this process can see its effects diminish after
a period of time, as even the enlarged job role become the mundane, this in turn can
lead to similar levels of demotivation and job dissatisfaction at the expense of increased
training levels and costs. The continual enlargement of a job over time is also known as
'job creep,' which can lead to an unmanageable workload.

Sociotechnical systems

Sociotechnical systems (STS) in organizational development is an approach to complex

organizational work design that recognizes the interaction
between people and technology in workplaces. The term also refers to the interaction
between society's complex infrastructures and human behaviour. In this sense, society
itself, and most of its substructures, are complex sociotechnical systems. The term
sociotechnical systems were coined in the 1960s by Eric Trist and Fred Emery, who
were working as consultants at the Tavistock Institute inLondon.

Sociotechnical systems theory is theory about the social aspects

of people and society and technical aspects of organizational structure and processes.
Here, technical does not imply technology. "Technical" was a term used in those times
to refer to structure and a broader sense of technicalities. Sociotechnical refers to the
interrelatedness of social and technical aspects of an organisation. Sociotechnical
theory therefore is about joint optimization, with a shared emphasis on achievement of
both excellence in technical performance and quality in people's work lives.
Sociotechnical theory, as distinct from sociotechnical systems, proposes a number of
different ways of achieving joint optimisation. They are usually based on designing
different kinds of organisation, ones in which the relationships between socio and
technical elements lead to the emergence of productivity and wellbeing.
Overview

Sociotechnical refers to the interrelatedness of social and technical aspects of

an organization. Sociotechnical theory is founded on two main principles:

 One is that the interaction of social and technical factors creates the conditions
for successful (or unsuccessful) organizationalperformance. This interaction consists
partly of linear ‘cause and effect’ relationships (the relationships that are normally
‘designed’) and partly from ‘non-linear’, complex, even unpredictable relationships
(the good or bad relationships that are often unexpected). Whether designed or not,
both types of interaction occur when socio and technical elements are put to work.
 The corollary of this, and the second of the two main principles, is that
optimization of each aspect alone (socio or technical) tends to increase not only the
quantity of unpredictable, ‘un-designed’ relationships, but those relationships that
are injurious to the system’s performance.
Therefore sociotechnical theory is about joint optimization. Sociotechnical theory, as
distinct from sociotechnical systems, proposes a number of different ways of achieving
joint optimization. They are usually based on designing different kinds of organization,
ones in which the relationships between socio and technical elements lead to the
emergence of productivity and wellbeing, rather than the all too often case of new
technology failing to meet the expectations of designers and users alike.

The scientific literature shows terms like sociotechnical all one word,

or sociotechnical with a hyphen, sociotechnical theory, sociotechnical
system and sociotechnical systems theory. All of these terms appear ubiquitously but
their actual meanings often remain unclear. The key term 'sociotechnical' is something
of a buzzword and its varied usage can be unpicked. What can be said about it, though,
is that it is most often used to simply, and quite correctly, describe any kind of
organization that is composed of people and technology. But, predictably, there is more
to it than that.
Principles

Some of the central principles of sociotechnical theory were elaborated in a seminal

paper by Eric Trist and Ken Bamforth in 1951. This is an interesting case study which,
like most of the work in sociotechnical theory, is focused on a form of ‘production
system’ expressive of the era and the contemporary technological systems it contained.
The study was based on the paradoxical observation that despite improved technology,
productivity was falling, and that despite better pay and amenities, absenteeism was
increasing. This particular rational organisation had become irrational. The cause of the
problem was hypothesized to be the adoption of a new form of production technology
which had created the need for a bureaucratic form of organization (rather like classic
command-and-control). In this specific example, technology brought with it a retrograde
step in organizational design terms. The analysis that followed introduced the terms
‘socio’ and ‘technical’ and elaborated on many of the core principles that sociotechnical
theory subsequently became.
Responsible autonomy
Sociotechnical theory was pioneering for its shift in emphasis, a shift towards
considering teams or groups as the primary unit of analysis and not the individual.
Sociotechnical theory pays particular attention to internal supervision and leadership at
the level of the ‘group’ and refers to it as ‘responsible autonomy’[1] The overriding point
seems to be that having the simple ability of individual team members being able to
perform their function is not the only predictor of combat effectiveness. There are a
range of issues in team cohesion research, for example, that are answered by having
the regulation and leadership internal to a group or team [2].

These, and other factors, play an integral and parallel role in ensuring successful
teamwork which sociotechnical theory exploits. The idea of semi-autonomous groups
conveys a number of further advantages. Not least among these, especially in
hazardous environments, is the often felt need on the part of people in the organisation
for a role in a small primary group. It is argued that such a need arises in cases where
the means for effective communication are often somewhat limited. As
Carvalho [3] states, this is because “…operators use verbal exchanges to produce
continuous, redundant and recursive interactions to successfully construct and maintain
individual and mutual awareness…”. The immediacy and proximity of trusted team
members makes it possible for this to occur. The co-evolution of technology and
organizations brings with it an expanding array of new possibilities for novel interaction.
Responsible autonomy could become more distributed along with the team(s)
themselves.

The key to responsible autonomy seems to be to design an organization possessing the

characteristics of small groups whilst preventing the ‘silo-thinking’ and ‘stovepipe’
neologisms of contemporary management theory. In order to preserve “…intact the
loyalties on which the small group [depend]…the system as a whole [needs to contain]
its bad in a way that [does] not destroy its good”.[1] In practice [4] this requires groups to
be responsible for their own internal regulation and supervision, with the primary task of
relating the group to the wider system falling explicitly to a group leader. This principle,
therefore, describes a strategy for removing more traditional command hierarchies.

Q5: What are the various selection methods available for a HRM Manager during a
hiring process?

Effective hiring goes by a fancier name: behavioral consistency. Behavioral consistency

simply means that whatever a person did in the past is likely what they will do in the
future in the same or a similar situation. And, if you’re not already, now is a crucial time
to include it in your employee hiring practice.
“Wait a minute!” you may be thinking.”Someone tell this guy we’re in a recession. I am
certainly not planning to hire anyone!” That brings up two good reasons why now the
time to get informed is:

1. Recessions end. Some forecasters are now predicting that this one will start
turning around in the fourth quarter this year.
2. You may start hiring back previously laid-off employees before you hire people
off the street. This often makes sense because your former employees
already know your company and may likely be thrilled that you will consider
bringing them back. Good morale does wonders for productivity! Even more, if
you’re rehiring after a layoff, you may actually be mandated to first hire back
your laid-off workers by terms of a collective bargaining agreement.

Hiring Employees Step 1: Developing a Job Posting

Let’s talk about using behavioral consistency for hiring previously laid-off workers. Your
company may no longer have the job at which a previously laid-off worker was a whiz.
That means you do not want to hire the person back based completely on past job
performance. But since they were a whiz at one job, they may be great at another one.
You first have to be able to tell the person about the new job. You can do this in a job
posting and see how well your assessment (like a pre-employment questionnaire or an
interview) says they fit the new job duties. Or, you can go straight to a hiring interview
and skip the posting step. I like to use job postings because they summarize the job so
applicants can see if their skills fit the job before they bother with the job assessment.
You can get a job posting ready and start to figure out what to ask applicants in one
step. Do this by collecting information from people who know the job best. It’s time for
another fancy name. This process of gathering information is called a job analysis. Keep
the information you collect in a file on the recruitment for this position. Date the notes
and have the person from whom you collected the information sign them. Doing this
may pay dividends if your process gets questioned in court, by the EEOC (Equal
Employment Opportunity Commission), or by another group. By the way, the fancy
name for the information-giver in this case is a subject matter expert.
An Example Job Posting
Let’s take an example of creating a job posting so you can easily look for behavioral
consistency in your job candidates. We’ll say that, pre-recession, your company had
separate shipping & receiving and inventory departments. They were merged in a cost-
saving step. You had an employee who was laid off before that merger took place in an
earlier cost-saving step. So, that person’s exact job no longer exists but you now need
to hire for a position in this newly-formed department.
The following is a list of the basic job requirements of the position:
 Unload product off trucks, check it in with an electronic inventory control device,
and verify the shipment against the packing slip that came with it to make sure
what has arrived is what was ordered.
 If any product is on back-order, enter it in a computer “tickler file” to follow-up
later.
 Required lifting is less than 20 pounds. Pallets jacks lift the heavy stuff.
 The most important things in this job require someone who is really detail-
oriented and correctly logs in merchandise off the truck. You want someone who
sweats the small stuff! All of this information is on the job posting and will help
attract people with skills and interest in this work.
Hiring Employee Step 2: Prioritizing Job Skills
Next we’ll consider what the job analysis and information gathering tells you that you do
not put in the job posting. You will use this data to choose questions to ask in the job
assessment, such as an interview, and to rank applicants. In this position, correctly
logging in the merchandise is more important than anything else. The order information
in your store is on an Excel spreadsheet, so this position needs to be able to bring up
the order on the computer and make a tickler file for back-orders. Applicants do not
have to be a whiz at all of this, but must be reasonably skilled so they can do these
things independently.
The following additional job duties and abilities are relatively minor in importance:
  At slow times on the sales floor, this position moves product from the storeroom
to the sales floor.  If customers come up to him or her while putting out product
on the sales floor, the position tries to sell it.
 Checking in the product is a simple step of waving the device over a bar code on
the box. It is not worth asking applicants if they have experience at this.
Hiring Employees Step 3: Applying Behavioral Consistency to Hiring
Now that you have a clear sense of not only the knowledge, skills and abilities the
positions requires, but also how to prioritize them, you can apply behavioral consistency
easily when reviewing your candidates for the position. The following is a breakdown of
each area that must be assessed and how to apply behavioral consistency.
Detail Orientation

If the laid-off person has logged in merchandise, or done something similar in the past,
he or she gets more points in evaluation of their response to the interview question than
applicants who do not fit the job duty as well. If the person has done work that requires
attention to detail and is similar to the job duty, they also get points but fewer than the
other applicant because their experience does not fit this important job requirement as
closely. We’ll call that the reasonably- skilled level. If the person has done something
that is detail-oriented but not similar to the job duty they get even fewer points than the
reasonably- skilled level. If the person has not been detail-oriented in past work they get
no points.

Knowledge of Excel

If the laid-off person put data on Excel spreadsheets, he or she gets more points when
their response is evaluated. If the person used another type of software spreadsheet,
they get fewer points. If the person seems to have some computer skills but not on
spreadsheets, they get fewer points still. If the person has little computer background,
they get no points.

If this job assessment shows that the laid-off person is reasonably skilled in these
important job duties, you’ve found your new employee!