Information System

October 1, 2017

Stage III: Strategic and Operational Outcomes

Strategic Outcomes Comment by Jennifer Carter: Excellent lead-in paragraphs!

The purpose of this proposed recruitment and hiring information system is to offer the company’s management with valuable and current information and support that is required for strategic planning. These include addressing strategic issues such as turnover trends, recruitment and hiring statistics, employee compensation and benefit costs and trends, and employee demographic changes. Thus, one of the expected strategic outcomes is to provide valuable and current data for monitoring the progress and impacts of change (Bhatia & Mittal, 2009). This is because the recruitment and hiring information system supports the change agent role by offering instant communication of changes to employees as a supplement to face-to-face communication. The communication system can also be comprehensive or general, with updates or revised instantly and in real-time. This outcome is in line with the need to ensure that employees and top management teams receive and update data on a real-time manner.

Another significant outcome is reduction of administrative burdens through maximization of data-related procedures. This will be attained by tracking of applicants, government reporting, as well as management reporting. This will be attained through provision of instant information to other members of the firm, thus reducing the time taken to process. For instance, it can minimize the number of phone calls and paper transactions. In the process, employees will have the chance to review and update their own personal data. This has the effect of minimizing the time taken by HR to perform data entry (Kavanagh & Johnson, 2017). By providing managers quick access to key data on their employees, managers can make timely and appropriate decisions, recommendations on employees and applicant compensation packages. Furthermore, the presence of workflow features like online leave requests and approval also reduces heaps of paperwork and telephone tags.

The strategic outcomes of this recruitment and hiring process are the need to ensure that the company’s HRM is wholly integrated into strategic planning. This can be done by giving room for coherent HRM policies, which will allow line managers to utilize better HRM practices as component of the day-to-day work. Another strategic outcome is to foster commitment. This strategic outcome will be attained by making sure that employees and other organizational members feel bound to the company and are devoted to high performance via excellent behaviors. Flexibility also forms an integral component of the strategic outcome in that the system will provide an adaptable organizational structure and functional flexibility on the basis of multiple skills. Most significantly quality of will be attained by enabling a high quality of products and services via high-quality-flexible workers.

The strategic significance of the proposed recruitment and hiring system is its capacity to provide the manager with information needed to support strategic decision-making. Various operational-level information systems help to collect and report human resource information. Such systems include data regarding the company’s positions and employees on government regulations. Strategic functions are supported when human resource department maintains information on each of the company’s workers for various decisions and reporting purposes. One element of this employee information system is a collection of human resource profile data. An employee profile is often comprised of personal and organizational-associated data. These kinds of data include name, address, gender, minority status, marital status, citizenship, as well as years of service or level of seniority. Other additional information includes employees’ levels of education, training, and wage grades. Such data can be important in making strategic decisions in terms of determining the most suitable employee for promotion and rewards.

Process Analysis

The proposed system will be utilized to support various hiring and recruitment procedures. The first process will entail planning process evaluation of human resource needs to ensure that the company has the required number of workers, with the necessary skills, to meet its objectives, also referred to as employment planning. Human Resource planning is a proactive procedure which both anticipates and influences a firm’s future by systematically forecasting the demands for and supply of employees under the changing conditions, and coming up with plans and activities to meet these needs (Kavanagh & Johnson, 2017). The main steps include using the system to forecast demand for labor considering organizational strategic and tactical plans, economic situations, market and competitive trends, social problems, demographic patterns, and technological shifts.

The information system that has been proposed supports recruitment by searching for and attracting sufficient number of qualified candidates, from whom the firm may choose the most suitable candidate to fill its staff needs. This procedure kicks off when the need to fill a position is identified and ends with the receipt of CVs and completed application forms online (O'Meara & Petzall, 2013). The outcome of this process is gathering and storing rich data containing a pool of qualified job seekers from which the individual best matching the job recruitment standards can be chosen. Thus, the system supports all stages of the hiring and recruitment process, including identification of job openings, definition of job requirements, selection of relevant recruiting sources and methods, and producing a rich pool of qualified candidates. Since the profiles of job candidates are kept and structured well within the database of the system, the most suitable candidate for any particular job position is reliant on various factors, which range from company policies and plans, to job requirements.

Further, the system also supports selection process in that it ensures that the management chooses individuals with the relevant qualifications to fill the existing vacant or future job openings. Data and information regarding the applicants’ current employers, whether for transfer or promotions, or outside candidates for the first time positions with the company are also gathered and assessed (O'Meara & Petzall, 2013). The procedures in the selection process, in ascending order include preliminary reception of applications, applicant screening, selection testing, selection interview, background assessment, as well as reference checking. Others include supervisory interview and realistic job previews.

Requirements

System requirements refer to what the company expects the recruitment and hiring system will perform. Some of the requirements for this system include compensation, hiring, promotion, and training. This computing technology will support these functions by ensuring that more transactions take place with fewer fixed resources. Examples include payroll, flexible benefits administration, as well as health benefits processing. In order to ensure that these tasks are accomplished, the system will have three main functional components: input, data maintenance, and output (Kavanagh & Johnson, 2017). The input function works by entering and gathering employee data into the hiring system. The process of entering data can be supported by numerous technologies, such as scanning devices and technologies, which allows for scanning and storing of actual images off original documents.

The maintenance function performs the task of updating and adding new data to the database after data have been entered into the information system. Additionally, the visible function of the system is output generated. In order to produce valuable outputs for different user groups, the hiring system will have to process that output, making necessary calculations, and formatting the presentations in ways that can be understood by users (Kavanagh & Johnson, 2017). Thus, the most significant aspects of the system will not be the computer hardware and software resources utilized, but the types of data that will be stored. This is because information reliability, validity, and utility will come first while the automation procedure will follow.

References Comment by Jennifer Carter: Good use of references.

Bhatia, K., & Mittal, S. (2009). Manpower development for technological change. New Delhi:

Excel Books India.

Kavanagh, M. J., & Johnson, R. D. (Eds.). (2017). Human resource information systems: Basics,

applications, and future directions. Boston: Sage Publications.

O'Meara, B., & Petzall, S. (2013). Handbook of Strategic Recruitment and Selection: A Systems

Approach. Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing.