Introduction and Company Overview
The main responsibility of human resource management is recruitment and training of personnel. However, organizations face various challenges while recruiting employees about labor supply and demand, firm image and reputation, diversity, and demographic issues (Doyle & Locke, 2014). Woolworths, an Australian based food retailer company provides wholesale merchandise for third-party supermarkets in Australia and New Zealand. Woolworths further operates more than 300 hotels, and all these operations are run by employees. Woolworth’s unwavering dedication to delivering the best convenience, value, and quality services to the customers makes the company recruit as many adequate employees as possible. The company is one of the leading employers in Australia employing over 205,000 team members who serve over 29 million customers across its stores each week (Dos Santos, Svensson, & Padin, 2013). The human resource management department of this retail company is tasked to recruit qualified and experienced workforce. However, the recruitment of personnel is faced with various challenges which adversely affects the performance of Woolworths.
The fact that Woolworths is ranked as one of the biggest employers in Australia and New Zealand, the human resource management of the company faces serious challenges for workforce recruitment. Woolworths consistently loses qualified job applicants in the hiring process (Doyle & Locke, 2014). The underlying challenges to workforce recruitment at Woolworths include:
Demographic issues pose challenges in the recruitment and hiring of a diverse workforce at Woolworths. Demographic challenges include the aging workforce, color, diversity, and generations disparity. Woolworths is known to recruit new casual employees on a weekly basis. However, this process is full of prejudice that leads to underestimation of applicants qualified for the job due to poor interviewing skills of some departmental managers (Hendry, 2012). Sometimes, Woolworths human resource management denies potential job applicants the opportunity to work based on their color and racism. For example, the recruitment of permanent staff is full or racism something which makes the company hire more old aged staff who offer little or no impact on the retail businesses of the firm.
Lack of diversity in the recruitment of new employees at Woolworths has been a challenge. The human resource management is gender bias, nationality biased, and race centered when interviewing employees. Woolworths operates in the global market; its inability to hire employees from diverse countries in equal measure has been a stumbling block for the company’s desire to expand its operations into worldwide emerging markets (Klettner, Clarke, & Boersma, 2014). Other global enterprises in the retail industry such as Target and Walmart employ diversity in the recruitment of employees, and this gives them a competitive edge against Woolworths.
The negative reputation Woolworth has to the public when it comes to recruitment has made the company miss out skilled and knowledgable talents to its competitors. The negative image of human resource strategies to recruitment and management of workforce has demotivated job seekers from applying jobs in the company with a fear that they will just be turned down. The scarcity of workforce has made Woolworth’s lack new talents to invest new ideas for retail business success (Purce, 2014). Woolworths faces a significant redundancy liability from the job applicants who fear that the company will consider them as weak minded people. The job specifications and qualification again sway away potential job candidates who lack the experience but are capable of fitting to the systems.
Challenges for Recruiting Workforce
Backbreaking labor, highly strict demands, heavy lifting, and unpaid overtime has been a major blow to the company’s workforce. These situations force employees to resign from working with Woolworths and go working for the firm’s close competitors. The frustrated workers go to court and sue the company for unpaid salaries, and this escalates to the members of the public (Purce, 2014. The negative reputation formed to the public tarnishes the image of recruiting program and human resource management of Woolworths making people avoid applying for the company’s advertised job vacancies. Research done on 1000 employees of Woolworths shows that the Australian-based retailer has been backbreaking labor and overworking the current workforce.
The valuation of labor demand and supply has also been a problem for the company when recruiting new employees. The HR managers face numerous challenges in the management of redeployment and redundancy of labor demand and supply patterns in the business environment. The company has struggled in its attempt to redeploy the majority of frequent casual laborers which has been caused by cost limitation perspectives (Renwick, Redman & Maguire, 2013). Woolworths faces industrial pressures from labor unions in events when the employees feel they are being treated poorly. The pressures from labor unions directly affect demand from buyers, the adverse effect when employees reject offers from the company to meet customers needs.
Woolworths company has been running slave labor camps. The demand and labor supply patterns have been a great challenge to the recruiting of the workforce for Woolworths. Woolworths is known to demand labor supply of at least 205,000 team members who serve over 29 million customers across its stores each week. However, the demand for gasoline, liquor, electronic appliances, and other products and services offered by Woolworths has been subject to change due to the unpredictable changes in the market (Stone & Deadrick, 2015). The human resource management team faces the challenge of the number of the workforce to recruit and lay off on a weekly basis due to unpredictable market constraints. Sometimes when demand for retail services is high on the market, the supply of labor is not available.
The recruitment process at Woolworths is slow and tedious. The hiring process at Woolworths follows complex processes which involve pre-qualification, detailed applications, and competency testing. The retail firm employs long interview programs, skills test, aptitude tests, supervised tests all the way before meeting corporate management interviewers (Schuler, Jackson, & Tarique, 2011). The fact that these extended interview programs are followed to ensure recruitment of qualified employees in a fair and equitable way, this process is highly costly to the company. Woolworths sometimes recruit candidates with incorrect culture-fit due to the avoidance of online hiring solutions. Employees are not screened over the computer through simulators, and this makes the company make mistakes whose repair is costly for the firm.
Recruitment of workforce for Woolworths is governed by interview policies which require strict adherence to the human resource management while conducting this noble duty. Sometimes the interviewee of Woolworths lose focus and start asking applicants personal issues something which creates about discussion other than accomplishing the main idea of the interview (Renwick, Redman & Maguire, 2013). Such unnecessary discussions prolong the interview time, and this remains to be costly for the company. Again, some of the applicants feel discouraged by the personal questions or questions asked by the HR interviewers of Woolworths which are deemed less important and out of context. Also, the hiring process at Woolworths takes even a month; this discourages potential and more qualified talents from attending the interview since this may be costly to them in relation to time and money.
Demographic Challenges
The fact that Woolworths aspires to offer equal employment opportunities to the applicants and to provide the largest number of job opportunities globally makes the company unable to pay competent salaries to the employees. Mostly, employees get discouraged of working for Woolworths and prefer getting employment in better-paying firms who are direct and close competitors of the company (Storey, 2014). Also, the few people who are paid competent salaries are highly overworked by the corporation to ensure that they pay for the salaries they earn. In the dynamic retail industry, the companies that give fair salaries win the best talent/employees. On the other side, since Woolworths have been providing a large number of job opportunities, the company has been unable to offer competent salaries for professional workers and thus missing to win their talents.
Further, Woolworths have been slow to act on the flexibility of employees working hours and creation of a conducive working climate for all staff in the company be they casual or permanent. The competitors of Woolworths understand that Woolworths is more competitive in the industry due to its strong capital base.
The immense challenges facing Woolworths recruitment processes have damaged the company’s employees value image to the public (Storey, 2014). The Australia’s biggest supermarket has been struggling to remain competitive in the retail sector for its marketing strategy has faltered something which is greatly attributed to recruitment challenges in the company as discussed above. The management of the company needs to take corrective actions to brand and revive its fortunes in the market. These strategies include:
Currently, the company is going wrong since it does not recruit employees from diverse gender, skills, and expertise. There has been racial prejudice and massive corruption involved in the recruitment process something which leads to the hiring of less skilled and knowledge workforce (Stone & Deadrick, 2015). To solve this challenge, the management of Woolworths should form strict regulations that govern the recruitment programs. Further, the HRM of the company should strictly scrutinize the qualifications and experience of employees without any bias to recruit the best candidate for the job.
In the past, Woolworths has gone wrong in the utilization of human resources within the work environment. Employees have been highly overworked at a lower pay to an extent that even when they work for overtime hours, they end up not receiving their pay. The poor employee compensation approaches by Woolworths makes the personnel leave the firm and go working for the competing companies hence losing competitive advantage (Terpstra, Foley, & Sarathy, 2012). To address this challenge, the company should assure favorable compensation program for the employees during the recruitment date. Further, the company should stop overworking the current staff to encourage employee and talent retention. Also, the management should introduce bonus payments and commission for extra work done by the employees.
Sometimes, there has been increased demand for qualified personnel at Woolworths. Again, the market has been having many potential candidates seeking for jobs which are limited and hence creating high unemployment. The company should differentiate its operations by providing flexibility when it comes to employees working hours and shifts (Storey, 2014). Flexibility will expand the potential of candidates to get recruited by Woolworths significantly. The company should make efforts to ensure that the hired employees only have the necessary to ensure the right competition is considered in the employment of staff.
Organizational Image
The most important factor in workers recruitment is ensuring that the hired personnel has the right skills and qualifications. This means that the best candidate is not judged by how long and complicated the hiring process is for a company. To address the challenge and problems attached to complex recruitment procedures, the company needs to minimize the time used in the interview process to cut down recruitment costs (Berman, Bowman, West, & Van Wart, 2012). Further, Woolworths should administer online aptitude tests which are marked by simulator at one time so that the long time used in the manual review gets avoided.
The public domain has formed a negative attitude and perception on Woolworths inability to offer competent salaries to the employees, and this sways away job applicants from seeking jobs at the company. The most appropriate strategy to address this challenge is the inclusion of salary parks in the company’s adverts so that job seeker can access the pay for a given job post at Woolworths (Bryman & Bell, 2015). Further, Woolworths should offer bonus payments to a job well done by employees to retain them at the company. Further, the company should provide its workforce fringe benefits such as house allowances and tax exemptions as am an approach to convince the job seekers that it offers reasonable and competent salaries to the personnel.
Conclusion
The business environment has been very competitive requiring every company to hire highly skilled and qualified workforce who can innovate and apply new ideas within the workplace to increase organization’s productivity. The type of employees hired and recruited by a company determines the level of its success in the business climate. Excellent workforce assists companies to innovate new ideas, be competitive, and thrive in the market. Every organization should address the underlying demographic, reputation, labor supply and demand, recruitment processes, and incompetent salaries related challenges that affect the recruitment programs of the company so as to thrive and firmly position themselves in the market.
References
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