Introduction
Staffing is the act of sourcing for the most qualified or suitable person to work with them. Staffing entails comparing an individual’s competencies with the requirements of the job he or she is expected to take. Before any organization embarks on staffing, the individuals recruited to fill vacant positions are taken through a rigorous exercise to determine those that best fit the job description and those who shall be dropped. First, an organization conducts a recruitment process for potential employees. Here, an organization selects the most competent persons by taking them through an interview or tests. In other words, the staffing process entails numerous steps which includes strategizing, forecasting for the required number of staffs, and manpower planning, amongst others (Asiko, 2009, para. 2). It also entails managing the existing staffs by relocating or deploying them to various departments within the organization based on their skills, competencies and experience. At times, organizations may outsource their staffing exercise to other firms. This helps a firm to acquire the most competent employees as these staffing firms have the knowledge of selecting the most competent employees.
For staffing companies to give their clients the best employees, they conduct intensive analysis of clients’ organizations to identify the different job requirements. This helps them in selecting staffs that best meet these job requirements. Despite these companies supplying their clients with staff, nonetheless, the final decision on whether or not to staff rests with the clients. In this regard, the staffing group comes up with a co-employment relationship with their clients. The staffing group assumes the responsibility for all conformity issues, administrative matters of the selected employees as well as human resource issues. For different organizations, there are numerous stages passed in the staffing process. This paper shall explore the staffing process within Bank of America and highlights some of the stages that are involved in the staffing exercise (Asiko, 2009, para. 3-5).
Staffing process in Bank of America
In order to acquire the most competent staff, Bank of America employs various strategies in its staffing process. Some of the strategies employed include defining the crucial staffing issues that affect the bank, identifying staffing surpluses and gaps, coming up with staffing strategies, and establishing staffing plans.
Identifying critical staffing issues
The effectiveness of staffs recruited in the bank depends on the ability of the bank to recruit the most suitable employees. To ensure that they have managed to recruit the best employees, bank of America ensures that it has concentrated on a small number of specifically critical staffing issues or job groups. As opposed to analyzing the entire organization to determine its employee needs, the bank focuses on individual department within the organization to identify its human resource problems. Through this process, the bank is able to identify the various employee needs within individual departments and identify those that require specific strategies during the staffing process. As a result, the bank prepares in advance, the necessary recruitment procedures that will be followed in recruiting its employees (Bechet, 2008, p. 114). This process helps in ensuring that the bank recruits employees based on the needs of an individual department thus helping to effectively meet the overall needs of an organization. Focusing on the needs of an entire organization may lead to the bank staffing some departments with more employees while others get staffs who do not effectively address the needs in the departments.
Defining staffing gaps and surpluses
Once the department responsible of staffing within the bank has identified the various employee needs of the individual departments within the bank, it embarks on analyzing staff requirements. They analyze the availability of staffs with the relevant competence required by individual departments. The organization also compares the demand versus supply of staffs for various departments. This helps them in coming up with a model that ensures they have not overstaffed or understaffed any department. In most cases, failure to identify demand and supply of staffs within the departments leads to some departments being overstaffed while others experience employee shortage. In the process, the organization suffers from some of its departments being inefficient while others have staffs that are not productive due to limited tasks assigned to them. In its staffing process, Bank of America identifies staffing gaps and surpluses within its different departments thus making sure that its have provided every department with the right number of employees as per its requirements (Bechet, 2008, p. 125).
Establishing staffing strategies
After identifying the staffing gaps, deficits and surpluses problems, the bank comes up with staffing strategies that will help it solve these problems. This entails establishing long-term strategies that will help it in aligning staffing supply and demands. These strategies do not help the bank to avoid experiencing staff shortage at any particular time nor do they employ surplus staffs. Staffing strategies also helps the bank in ensuring that it has acquired the most relevant employees for its departments. The strategies entails coming up with the recruitments procedures that will be used in getting the required staffs. Based on employee demand for every departments and employee supply, the bank establishes recruitment exercise that would help it in selecting the most experienced staffs to work with them (Bechet, 2008, pp. 132-145). This consist of organizing for screening exercise for all those people who apply to be considered for vacancies in the bank, organizing for methods to be used interview conduction and other elimination methods to be used in case of surplus applicants.
Recruitment and selection process
Once an organization has laid down its staffing strategies, it embarks on notifying potential applicants on the available vacancies. Without notifying potential applicants on the available vacancies within an organization, it becomes hard for such organization to attract qualified staffs. This can be through advertising their vacancies in the internet, using other employees in communicating to their friends on the available vacancies or outsourcing the recruitment exercise to other firms. Bank of Africa, on its side, advertises its vacancies in the internets as well as through other media such as televisions. The bank clearly outlines al job specifications and the kind of staff they need thus ensuring that have gotten people with the right skills. In selection process, all those who apply for the advertised vacancies are screened to ensure that they have remained with the most qualified applicants (Cascio & Aguinis, 2008, pp. 133-137). The process features identifying the best applicants who can effectively fit and manage a particular position based on the bank’s demand. Some of the methods used in selection process include administering tests to all applicants with a view to determining their knowledge in dealing with different problems affecting the positions they wish to occupy. From the test, those applicants that appear to demonstrate good knowledge of methods of solving these problems are allowed to go for the next stage. The bank also administers interviews on all applicants as well as filling of application forms. This process is conducted in a transparent manner ensuring that only the most qualified applicants are recruited into the working group in the bank.
Orientation, training and development
Despite the selected applicants demonstrating knowledge in dealing with various problems within the bank, they require to be taken through an orientation exercise to familiarize them with all the activities taking place within the banking industry. They are informed of the bank’s goals and objectives (Cascio & Aguinis, 2008, pp. 138-143). This exercise is useful in reducing anxiety within the newly recruited staffs as well as helping them adjust to their new environment. Based on departments they are deployed to, all newly recruited staffs are taken through all job requirements. The bank demonstrates how activities are conducted within the organization. In spite of recruiting the most qualified staffs, these staffs require to be taken through training and development to help them carry out their duties as per bank’s expectations. Training and development exercise is conducted based on job requirements. Some of the training takes the form of on the job while others are off the job training. Recruited staffs are taken through regular training as they continue with their responsibilities in different departments. The training helps in strengthening their knowledge as well as equipping them with new skills on how to conduct various activities effectively and efficiently.
Performance appraisal
Once the bank has acquired the required staff, it comes up with a standard of evaluating their performance to determine if they are performing as per their expectations and identifying the various hardships they experience when executing their duties. On areas where the staffs are found not to perform as they are expected, human resource management team work together with them in identifying the reasons that make them not perform accordingly. In areas where they are found to perform perfectly, the bank takes the initiative of recognizing their effort thus ensuring that they strive to ensure that they have contributed in attaining the organization’s goals (Cascio & Aguinis, 2008, pp. 149-165). This helps the human resource management team within the bank in making informed decisions on the kind of training to offer to these employees.
Improvements that need to be made in staffing process
Most of the current steps followed in staffing process within bank of America incline towards traditional practices. There are various mechanisms that require to be incorporated in the staffing process of Bank of America. It is imperative for the bank to identify an objective for the process. This would be very helpful in the establishment of an ideal framework for decision making as opposed to forecasting future problems that may rock the bank. It is difficult to predict future staffing problems that may affect the bank. As an alternative it is important for the bank to take staffing process as a long-term issue which will be catered for by coming up with short-term staffing decisions. Through making short term staffing decision strategies, the organization will be able to reap the long term benefits. It is also not productive to consider staffing from an implementation direction (Omuga, 2000, pp. 1-3). Even if this has been productive in the past, the bank does not need to have a perception that staffs need to cater for its different problems are readily available. This has been a major problem that has led to the bank experiencing shortage in its staffs. The bank needs to plan in advance and identify some of the constraints that make it experience shortage in qualified staffs and come up with a plan of addressing these problems.
There is the need for the bank to tailor its staffing process with its needs.
Using the same staffing process for all departments within the bank may lead to the bank not getting qualified staffs to meet different needs affecting individual department. It is imperative for the bank to regularly vary the parameters used in its staffing process such as structure of the models used in recruiting and number of applicants to be considered. This will help the bank in getting a wide variety of applicants thus being able to acquire staffs that best meet needs of different departments. To get the most productive employee, it is imperative for human resource managers within the bank to focus on particular position within an individual department rather than considering staffs needs of the entire department (Tenk, 2000, para. 2-5). In most cases, staffing process within organizations tend to consider all jobs within individual departments. Not all jobs need to be effectively planned for when an organization intend to recruit new staffs. This is because some of the jobs can easily be filled from employees already working in the organization or they have massive number of potential applicants. Coming up with staffing strategy requires an organization to have thorough analysis of its needs. Focus on entire organization or department would take the organization a lot of time for it to develop a valuable strategy. Thus, for the bank of America to efficiently and valuably come up with a good staffing process, it requires to address individual position within the departments independently.
In most cases, organizations come up with staffing process at unit level but later combine all the units to form a single plan. In combining the process, organization lose some of the information that would be vital in identifying the best person who can manage and run a particular position. This is one of the factors that lead to organizations experiencing gaps and surpluses in their staffing process. When creating staffing strategy, Bank of America needs to ensure that it has kept all its plans detached and discrete. This is especially when addressing different employee needs within the bank. The bank only needs to come up with a staffing strategy that addresses the entire bank if the problem to be solved is addressed at the entire bank level (Turner, 2010, para. 1-3).
Conclusion
Based on the needs within every department in an organization, it is imperative to come up with different staffing processes. This will help in ensuring the recruiting team has gotten the right employees for every department. Addressing staffs needs at departmental level as well as every position independently helps in addressing the problem successfully. It is imperative for Bank of America to ensure that it has tailored its staffing process with its needs. This will help it in developing an effective staffing strategy that will ensure that it has recruited qualified employees. It will also help in eliminating incidences of suffering from gaps and surpluses experienced in staffing processes by most organizations.
Reference List
Asiko, S. (2009). Staffing Process. Web.
Bechet, T. P. (2008). Strategic Staffing: A Comprehensive System for Effective Workforce Planning. New York: AMACOM.
Cascio, W. F. & Aguinis, H. (2008). Staffing Twenty-first-century Organizations. Academy of Management Annals, 2, pp. 133-165.
Omuga, T. (2000). Developing Staffing Strategies That Work: Implementing Pragmatic, Nontraditional Approaches.(human resources planning). Web.
Tenk, K. (2000). Four Steps of Strategic Staffing Process. Designing Your Strategic Workforce Planning Process. Web.
Turner, R. (2010). The Staffing Process. Web.