Siti Rahimah Ramli

2009811544

Title :
Talent management
A strategy for improving employee recruitment, retention and
engagement within hospitality organizations

Introduction to Human resource

Human resources is a term used to describe the individuals who

comprise the workforce of an organization, although it is also applied in
labor economics to, for example, business sectors or even whole
nations. Human resources is also the name of the function within an
organization charged with the overall responsibility for implementing
strategies and policies relating to the management of individuals for
example the human resources. This function title is often abbreviated
to the initials 'HR'.

Human resources is a relatively modern management term, coined in

the 1960s.The origins of the function arose in organizations that
introduced 'welfare management' practices and also in those that
adopted the principles of 'scientific management'. From these terms
emerged a largely administrative management activity, co-ordinating a
range of worker related processes and becoming known, in time as the
'personnel function'. Human resources progressively became the more
usual name for this function, in the first instance in the United States
as well as multinational corporations, reflecting the adoption of a more
quantitative as well as strategic approach to workforce management,
demanded by corporate management and the greater competitiveness
for limited and highly skilled workers. he use of the term 'human
resources' by organizations to describe the workforce capacity
available to devote to the achievement of its strategies has drawn
upon concepts developed in Industrial or Organizational Psychology
and System Theory. Human resources has at least two related
interpretations depending on context.

The original usage derives from political economy and economics,

where it was traditionally called labor, one of four factors of production
although this perspective has shifted as a consequence of further
ongoing research into more strategic approaches. This first usage is
used more in terms of 'human resources development' of the
individuals within an organization, although the approach can also be
applied beyond the level of the organization to that of industry sectors
and nations.
The early development of the function can be traced back to at least
two distinct movements. One element has its origins in the late 19th
century, where organizations such as Cadburys at its Bournville
factory recognised the importance of looking after the welfare of the
workforce, and their families. The employment of women in factories in
the United Kingdom during the First World War lead to the introduction
of "Welfare Officers". Meanwhile, in the United States the concept of
human resources developed as a reaction to the efficiency focus of
Taylorism or "scientific management" in the early 1900s, which
developed in response to the demand for ever more efficient working
practices within highly mechanised factories, such as in the Ford Motor
Company. By 1920, psychologists and employment experts in the
United States started the human relations movement, which viewed
workers in terms of their psychology and fit with companies, rather
than as interchangeable parts.

During the middle of the last century, larger corporations, typically

those in the United States that emerged after the Second World War,
recruited personnel from the US Military and were able to apply new
selection, training, leadership, and management development
techniques, originally developed by the Armed Services, working with,
for example, university-based occupational psychologists. Similarly,
some leading European multinationals, such as Shell and Phillips
developed new approaches to personnel development and drew on
similar approaches already used in Civil Service training. Gradually,
this spread more sophisticated policies and processes that required
more central management via a personnel department composed of
specialists and generalist teams.

The role of what became known as Human Resources grew throughout

the middle of the 20th century. Tensions remained between academics
who emphasized either 'soft' or 'hard' HR. Those professing so-called
'soft HR' stressed areas like leadership, cohesion, and loyalty that play
important roles in organizational success. Those promoting 'hard HR'
championed more quantitatively rigorous management techniques in
the 1960s.

In the later part of the last century, both the title and traditional role of
the personnel function was progressively superseded by the
emergence, at least in larger organizations, of strategic human
resources management and sophisticated human resources
departments. Initially, this may have involved little more than
renaming the function, but where transformation occurred, it became
distinguished by the human resources having a more significant
influence on the organizations strategic direction and gaining board-
level representation. In simple terms, an organization's human
resource management strategy should maximize return on investment
in the organization's human capital and minimize financial risk. Human
Resources seeks to achieve this by aligning the supply of skilled and
qualified individuals and the capabilities of the current workforce, with
the organization's ongoing and future business plans and requirements
to maximize return on investment and secure future survival and
success. In ensuring such objectives are achieved, the human resource
function purpose in this context is to implement the organization's
human resource requirements effectively but also pragmatically,
taking account of legal, ethical and as far as is practical in a manner
that retains the support and respect of the workforce.

Human resource management (HRM) is the strategic and coherent

approach to the management of an organization's most valued assets
- the people working there who individually and collectively contribute
to the achievement of the objectives of the business.The terms
"human resource management" and "human resources" (HR) have
largely replaced the term "personnel management" as a description of
the processes involved in managing people in organizations.In simple
words, HRM means employing people, developing their capacities,
utilizing, maintaining and compensating their services in tune with the
job and organizational requirement. Human Resource
Management(HRM) is seen by practitioners in the field as a more
innovative view of workplace management than the traditional
approach. Its techniques force the managers of an enterprise to
express their goals with specificity so that they can be understood and
undertaken by the workforce, and to provide the resources needed for
them to successfully accomplish their assignments. As such, HRM
techniques, when properly practiced, are expressive of the goals and
operating practices of the enterprise overall. HRM is also seen by many
to have a key role in risk reduction within organisations.

A strategy for improving employee recruitment, retention and

engagement within hospitality organizations
Findings – Talent management is an espoused and enacted
commitment to implementing an integrated, strategic and technology
enabled approach to human resource management (HRM). This
commitment stems in part from the widely shared belief that human
resources are the organization’s primary source of competitive
advantage; an essential asset that is becoming in increasingly short
supply. The benefits of an effectively implemented talent management
strategy include improved employee recruitment and retention rates,
and enhanced employee engagement. These outcomes in turn have
been associated with improved operational and financial performance.
The external and internal drivers and restraints for talent management
are many. Of particular importance is senior management
understanding and commitment.
Discussion

Recruitment is collecting a group of people or individual to join an

organization. Hiring the right employee is a challenging process. Hiring
the wrong employee is expensive, costly to the work environment, and
time consuming. Hiring the right employee, on the other hand, pays
back in employee productivity, a successful employment relationship,
and a positive impact on the total work environment. Hiring the right
employee enhances the work culture and pays back a thousand times
over in high employee morale, positive forward thinking planning, and
accomplishing challenging goals. Employers face major challenges
when they consider the increasing difficulty of finding skilled people, a
younger workforce with different attitudes about work, and a growing
population of older workers heading toward retirement. Despite all the
diffilculties, strategical methods can be use to improve the rate of
recruitment, retention and engagement wiyhin organizations.
Successful organizations realize by having an effective employee
retention strategy will help them sustain their leadership and growth in
the marketplace. Good organizations make employee retention a core
element of their talent management and organizational development
strategy. Those that fail to make employee retention a priority are at
risk of losing their top talented people to the competition.

A focus on mutual respect between employees and supervisors,

appropriate pay, benefits and rewards, as well as recognition of
performance excellence, are key ingredients of an effective employee
retention. The importance of putting such actions into practice
generally is well understood by most employers, but actually doing
them takes time, so they are often left for another day. However, the
payoff of focusing on employee retention in terms of increased
performance, productivity, employee morale and quality of work, plus
a reduction in both turnover and employee-related problems is well
worth the investment of time and financial resources. The bottom line
is that the organization will retain talented and motivated employees
who truly want to be a part of the company and who are focused on
making a contribution to the organization’s overall success.

Notwithstanding extremely adverse economic conditions, one of the

most critical issues that organizations perennially face is how to retain
the employees they want to keep. Even in the midst of a deep
recession, companies must anticipate impending shortages of overall
talent as well as a shortfall of employees with the specialized
competencies needed to stay ahead of the competition. Organizations
that systematically manage employee retention both in good times
and bad will stand a greater chance of weathering such shortages.
Employees leave organizations for all sorts of reasons some find a
different job, some go back to school, and some follow a spouse who
has been transferred to a different location. Some retire, get angry
about some work-related or personal issue and quit on impulse, while
others simply decide they no longer need a job.

Generally, an individual will stay with an organization as long as the

inducements it offers for instance pay, good working conditions and
developmental opportunities that are equal to or greater than the
contributions required of the person by the organization. These
judgments are affected both by the individual’s desire to leave the
organization as well as the ease with which he or she could depart.

Studies have shown that employees typically follow four primary paths
to turnover, each of which has different implications for an
organization.
First is Employee dissatisfaction. Attack this with traditional retention
strategies such as monitoring workplace attitudes and managing the
drivers of turnover. Second is Better alternatives. It is to ensure that
the organization is competitive in terms of rewards, developmental
opportunities and the quality of the work environment as well as well
prepared to deal with external offers for valued employees. Thirdly is
following a plan. Some employees may have a predetermined plan to
quit. For instance, if their spouse becomes pregnant, if they get a
better job, if they are accepted into a degree program, etc. However,
increasing rewards tied to tenure may alter the plans of some
employees, like if a company is seeing exits based on family related
plans, adding a more generous maternity and family-friendly policy
may help to reduce the impact. Fourth part is leaving without a plan.
Employees sometimes leave on impulse, without any plan for the
future. Generally, this is the result of a negative response to a specific
action for example being passed over for a promotion,and difficulties
with a supervisor. These types and frequencies of work related issues
that are driving employees to leave.A training to minimize prevalent
negative interactions should be provided. Examples of negative
interactions is harassment, bullying or unfair and inconsistent
treatment and provide support mechanisms to deal with those
problems. For example conflict resolution procedures, alternative work
schedules or employee assistance programs.

Additional predictors of turnover that merit careful attention include,

organizational commitment and job satisfaction, quality of the
employee-supervisor relationship, role clarity,job design and
workgroup cohesion.
As important as it is to understand the reasons that drive employees to
leave an organization, it is just as important to understand why
valuable employees stay. Some recent studies have suggested that
employees become embedded in their jobs and their communities. As
they participate in their professional and community life, they develop
a web of connections and relationships, both on and off the job.
Leaving a job would require severing or rearranging these social and
value networks. Thus, the more embedded employees are in an
organization, the more likely they are to stay. Companies can increase
an employee’s embeddedness by providing mentors, designing work in
teams, fostering team cohesiveness, encouraging employee referrals
and providing clear socialization and communication about the
company’s values and culture, as well as financial incentives based on
tenure or unique incentives that may not be common elsewhere.

Practices that contribute to retention arise in all areas of HR. This

makes it critically important for professionals specializing in various HR
Disciplines within organizations to work together under HR leadership
to develop and implement multifaceted retention strategies. Broad-
based and targeted strategies, or a combination of both, may be
appropriate to the circumstances. Effective practices in a number of
areas can be especially powerful in enabling an organization to achieve
its retention goals. Effective practise include recruitmnet, selection,
socialization, training and development and compensation.
Recruitment practices strongly influence turnover. Considerable
research shows that presenting applicants with a realistic job preview
during the recruitment process has a positive effect on retention of
those new hires.
As for selection, the use of biographical data or biodata is an especially
effective technique for handling the selection process. Biodata
empirically identifies life experiences that tend to differentiate those
who stay with an organization and those who quit. Life experience
associated with people who stay may include significant tenure on
previous jobs, educational experience, involvement and leadership in
career-related clubs and organizations, and early work experiences.
Assessing “fit” for the organization can also shed light on the
compatibility of an individual with the work environment. Turnover is
often high among new employees. Research has shown that
socialization practices delivered via a strategic onboarding and
assimilation program can help new hires become embedded in the
company and, thus, more likely to stay. These practices include shared
and individualized learning experiences, formal and informal activities
that help people get to know one another, and the assignment of more
seasoned employees as role models for new hires. If people are not
given opportunities to continually update their skills, they are more
inclined to leave. However, training and development is a double-
edged sword as training may make employees more marketable,
increasing the ease with which they can be recruited by rival
organizations.Pay levels and satisfaction are only modest predictors of
an employee’s decision to leave the organization; however, a company
has three possible strategies, first is to lead the market with respect to
compensation and rewards.Second is tailoring reward to individuals
needs in a person-based pay structure. Third is explicitly link rewards
to retention for example tie vacation hours to seniority, offer retention
bonuses or stock options to longer-term employees, or link defined
benefit plan payouts to years of service.

Broad-based strategies

Broad-based strategies are directed at the entire organization or at

large subsystems and are intended to address overall retention rates.
Examples include providing across-the-board market-based salary
increases, changing the hiring process to incorporate retention-related
criteria and improving the work environment. The data to help a
company determine which broad-based strategies to implement
typically come from retention research, best or effective practice
review and benchmarking surveys.Retention research can shed
valuable light on the primary drivers of turnover. Attendance at
conferences and membership in professional associations can also
provide access to the latest research on turnover and retention.
Best/effective practices encompass the strategies that other
organizations are using and are finding effective or ineffective.
Benchmarking surveys can provide information about where a
company stands on issues such as pay, benefits, bonus plans and the
like.

Targeted strategies

Targeted strategies are based on data from several key sources,

including organizational exit interviews, post-exit interviews, employee
focus groups, predictive turnover studies and other qualitative studies.
This information can lead an organization to determine more
specifically where a problem exists and develop highly relevant and
linked strategies to address the issue for instance if female
professionals are departing the organization in significant numbers, a
company could review common reasons that women give for leaving a
company and develop strategies to specifically deal with this group of
employees.
Implementation

A company’s HR department typically is the linchpin of effective and

efficient administration of the employee retention strategy. Having an
HR team that is educated about employee motivation, retention
strategies and benchmarking and best practices research is critical to
the success of the program.

Laying the groundwork

HR typically would be responsible for taking the following steps that

together would yield the information that an organization needs to
determine the extent of its problem and to help shape the retention
strategies that are implemented in response. Determine whether
turnover is a problem. This can be accomplished through turnover
analysis, benchmarking and a needs assessment (both external and
internal). Determine the best way to proceed. After reviewing the
turnover analysis, benchmarking data and needs assessment, a
company should be prepared to determine the extent to which
turnover is a problem. Then broad-based or targeted strategies (or a
combination) should be considered and identified for
implementation.Implementing the retention plan. This step involves
actually putting into place the strategies that have been identified as
appropriate for the specific problem.Evaluating the results. After
implanting the plan, it will be important to evaluate the results to
assess their impact relative to their cost.

Benchmarking

Establishing appropriate benchmarks both external and internal is a

key first step in preparing to implement an employee retention
strategy.

Dealing with some common problems

As with all strategic initiatives, there are some common problems

associated with employee retention programs. These include, lack of
Top Management Support. If senior management does not send a
message to managers and supervisors emphasizing that employees
are critical to the company’s long-term success, they are likely not to
focus on people-related issues. Unless senior management actively
participates in the retention process and takes primary responsibility
for it, managers and employees will remain unsure of the true value of
employees, both to senior management and the organization. Other is
perception of the Program as Time-Consuming “Busywork.” Similarly,
without an organizational commitment to the initiative and a clear
understanding of how it is strategically contributing to the
organization’s successful long-term performance, managers will view a
focus on people as “nice” or “just busywork” and a huge waste of time
that takes them away from the more important demands of their “real
job.”

Costs and return on investment

Because there are so many different actions a company can take to

improve its employee retention rate, it is not feasible to quantify the
“typical” costs hard and soft of designing and implementing a
program. However, this does not mean that an organization should not
try to budget its own initiative carefully. The payback in financial terms
can be estimated by reviewing a number of HR metrics, including
turnover data, promotions/transfers from within vs. outside recruiting,
the number of grievances filed, absenteeism, and discrimination
complaints.

Auditing and evaluating

Any HR initiative or program, especially one designed to retain an

organization’s key talent needs to be continuously evaluated to
determine if it is effective and to identify opportunities for improving it.
A good way to determine whether the employee retention program is
working is to conduct an independent audit of the way the program is
affecting various groups of employees. For example, are certain types
of employees low-skilled, highly skilled, technical, professional,
managerial, executive or those with varying degrees of tenure are
leaving the organization at more significant levels than others. If so,
that group can be targeted for specific interventions.

Global approaches and perspectives

Increases in cultural differences within the workforce raise critical

issues for HR practitioners. Employee retention efforts have proven to
be very difficult in some parts of the world due to differing
expectations for pay, work assignments, benefits and the like. If a
company is global in scope or simply has a highly diverse employee
population, both cultural and national differences must be taken into
account at the outset of the development of any new HR-related
program, including employee retention strategies.