Perhaps the business owner did not like your look or for some reasons did not like your personality or the way you looked at him or the way he felt uncomfortable around you and you were out of the door. You had no recourse to any one for redress.

It was only in the 1930s that in the USA Congress began passing employment laws that made labor less discard-able (the Wagner Act that established the National Labor Relations Board and set the eight hour work day and overtime after that).

Human resource management is the section of the business enterprise that locates and hires qualified staff for the business. Every business has its own specialized employee needs.

Consider hospitals. It needs medical doctors (of many specialties), nurses and technicians to operate the bewildering array of equipments used in modern hospitals. Where is these specialized staff to be found? How many doctors are around town seeking employment? How many of them are specialists in say brain surgery, in Nigeria? If they are not around and you build a neurosurgery unit and want some one to operate on the brain, where do you go to find and hire him?

Are local university teaching hospitals producing brain surgeons? How much do these surgeons cost, $200 an hour? Do you have that kind of money to hire brain surgeons and have those on board or do you need to ship your patients who require brain surgery to other hospitals where brain surgery is performed?

The Human Resources Department ascertains the labor needs of employers and where they can be found. It finds out how much such labor costs (compensation) and whether the labor is willing to locate to the location where the employer does business. Take our brain surgeons. Would they want to live in the boonies, such as Owerri, or would they want to live in vibrant cities with university life, a place where they have access to the latest scientific information on the nature of the brain? If neurosurgeons are leery to live at Owerri, perhaps, there is something that human resources could do to still attract them to Owerri? How about increasing their pay? Or paying them to go to Lagos and Abuja for training, every quarter?

Human resources advertise vacancies in a business. Receives applications. Screens them and selects qualified persons for interview. The rule of the thumb is to invite five qualified applicants to interview for each available job.

The human resource manager does not do the interviewing herself (most of the people that do this job are women, so we might as well refer to them as women, this job category does not usually appeal to men since it is largely record keeping). The human resource person invites qualified applicants to an interview.

She then schedules them to be interviewed by the hiring manager, the manger or supervisor of the unit where such a person would be working.

If it is a low level position, the unit supervisor may do the entire interview by himself, perhaps, with the human resources staff sitting in. He ranks all five applicants and perhaps invites the top two for another round of interviews. Then he makes his selection decision. The person selected is informed by the human resources clerk and comes in for orientation.

For higher level positions, interviews are generally done by a team/panel interviews. The unit manager and other persons(sometimes you include one line staff in such interviews, if only to humor line staff that they are participating in making hiring decisions). The team, usually about five persons go around asking prepared questions. They rank all applicants on how they responded to them. The top two is invited to go see the hiring manager of the unit and he makes the final decision.

(In the USA, if you are black, you have probably gone through what we call employment wars. I cannot begin telling you how many times panels recommended me to the president of a university for hiring and he did not hire me. Why? There are jobs that are considered off limits to blacks at white universities. If you are black you can only go so far in racist America’s academia. Oh, every once in a while, they would have a token black vice president, such as Condoleezza Rice at Stanford University, but that is tokenism.)

When the hiring decision is made, the new employee comes in and fills out employment forms and the human resources personnel goes over with him the company’s policies and have him sign off that he received the policies handbook and understood what was written in it. He is then oriented to most aspects of the company’s operations. This may take two weeks. Thereafter, he is let lose to do the job he is hired to do.

He is placed on probation for six months, after which he is evaluated and if found satisfactory is retained, and if not, he is let go. He could be let go at any time during probation, satisfactory or not. (You are in slave-land and the slave master decides whether he is going to have you stick around or not. You had better please the man, if you want bread on your table. Please the man, keep your job and develop heart attack from repressed anger.)

Human resource keeps records on employees. This includes hiring records, benefits materials (health insurance, 401Ks, pensions etc), evaluations by supervisors, and letters of reprimands and so on.

Human sources are responsible for employee training. Every job category requires on-going training. Most businesses offer on the job training and off site training. Medical doctors, for example, must continually go receive training on new medical procedures and on how to prescribe new medications.

Human resources make sure that employees get their training needs up to date. Professionals are often required to have certain continuing education units, CEUs to be able to renew their licenses and must, therefore, be constantly trained.

I began this lecture by saying that in the past business owners used to hire and fire at will. Well, there are now umpteen laws that attempt to tell employers what to do with their employees. These personnel laws are known to human resources personnel and they advise supervisors on these laws, so that they could better deal with their troublesome employees.

Human resources are so filled with laws that it almost takes lawyers to be good human resource managers.

Human resources are increasingly becoming specialized. Within it are recruiters, compensation specialists, training specialists, organizational developers and all sorts of specialists. As we shall see when we deal with organizational psychology, human resources really boils down to figuring out ways to work well with human beings and use them to achieve organizational goals and not alienate them.

Human resources personal do such things as write each job’s description, job specification. What is expected of each position in an organization’s chart is specified. A position in an organization is a set of roles expected of that position and the employee is fitted into the role and must know what is expected of him and do them. If not he is let go.

Human resources folks go about the business asking those who actually do the jobs what they do and then write up what each position does and when a new employee is hired, he is given his job description, job specification etc and signs that he received it hence knows what he is supposed to do, what doing he would be evaluated for.

These days’ human resources handle employee benefits records. If the company has health insurance, the personnel manager manages it, that is, interfaces with the insurance company providing it. If the company has dental plan, the human resource folks manage it. If the company has pension plans, the human resource folks manage it. All these are essentially clerical functions.

The vice president of human resources attends the management team meetings. He gives management feedback on where to obtain qualified labor, its compensation and how that affects management’s future expansion plans.

If you are planning to build an engineering school, you had better know whether there are qualified engineers to teach at it and whether there are students with strong background in mathematics, physics and chemistry available to go to your school. Management needs to know about these things before it expends money in wide goose chasing.

It is probably unlikely that Nigeria has the capacity for nuclear physics and engineering in more than a few centers in the country, given the low level of the country’s technology, and poor education system. How many Nigerian students are versed in physics and mathematics? Does any one even keep such records?

Human resource managers almost always attend this or that meeting with technical managers, in other units, and with top management. These people are record keepers and their services seem invaluable.

However, it must be noted that in small businesses the owner is generally the human resource manager! In small sole proprietorships, even partnerships resources are not available to have human resource managers. At best, one trusted secretary is mandated with the task of human resources, while still doing her clerical duties.

Human resource is increasingly becoming a managerial function. But in the meantime, it performs mostly record keeping functions and, in as much as some one has to perform this task it seems necessary.

CONCLUSION

Public managers ought to know something about how their human resources departments hire people. Are they hiring employees on objective grounds, those who are qualified, or are they hiring on the bases of subjective reasons such as bribery, nepotism? What constitutes qualification? Are there validity and reliability studies indicating that the tests used in hiring employees, in fact, select qualified ones?

If you hire those who bribe you but who are not qualified for their jobs, the chances are that they would not be able to do their jobs well. Consider the Nigerian Electrical Power Authority. Do they have qualified electrical engineers at that ridiculous outfit? If so, how come electricity goes out just about every day? Poor capacity to generate the necessary electrical volume to service a developing economy? Okay. How about planning? How much electricity is needed for a population of 100 million persons? I suppose that there are mathematicians in Nigeria who can figure such things out? If so, can Nigeria’s electrical need be planned for? Can adequate generating capacity be purchased and constructed? Can the right number of technicians be hired? Can the right inputs be made to the system in general? The answer to all these is, of course, yes. But in Nigeria we hire people who cannot do anything well just because they are related to us. Then they do not do their jobs right and every thing brakes down and we seem surprised.

What do you expect? Garbage in garbage out. If you hire garbage the product you receive is garbage.

Every manager ought to know some thing about human resources management. The field tends to appeal to clerical oriented persons who like to keep records. Task oriented persons who want to use people to accomplish goals tend to go into other areas of management.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

Ozodi@africainstituteseattle.org