It may also be useful to look at the amount of people leaving when planning to recruit new staff; this may be done by the percentage wastage rate. This shows the amount of employees leaving as a percentage. When planning to recruit from external labour market analysis of the local employment of age trends, the number of people employed, will indicate the age group and the number of people who are working in certain regions.
The unemployment trends will help planning when it gives indication of the general availability of labour and suggest the advantage and disadvantage of recruiting. It is also important to find out more about similar business locality that have been lying off workers. Often when a major employer closes down or discards labour, this provides Marks & Spencer with an opportunity to employee if they see certain potential in the employee that fits the criteria they are looking for. These employees could have the right sort of skills or transferable skills that can be applied.
Internal Supply
Before M&S decide to recruit any employees externally it needs to consider whether it has the suitable candidates internally who could do the job efficiently. By doing this M&S are saving money and time by shortening the process of recruiting. Recruiting internally saves time on advertising and analysing the candidates, it will also take sometime before the new employee adapts to the working environment, therefore internal recruitment provides a lot of advantages. However, if the job on offer is highly specialised then the option of suitable candidates that match the criteria are much smaller. The personnel can do this by sifting through employees’ documentation that may contain past experience and skills gained before joining the company and appraisal reports.
M&S is one of many companies that ask employees to complete a ‘skills questionnaire’ to see whether they possess the required skills to take up a vacant job. A skills questionnaire may also be of help to the Human Resource Department to identify possible mentors and to plan training events if skills shortages are identified. This information is of use to the Human Resource Department when deciding whether to advertise internally. (Unfortunately it was not possible to gain a skills questionnaire from Marks and Spencer).
Statistics and information would be collected on employees already within Marks and Spencer, which would cover the following areas:
- The number of employees in particular job categories
- The skills available
- Skills analysis
- Performance results
- Promotion potential
- Age distribution and length of service
- Staff turnover
The number of employees in particular job categories
This figure will give a broad overview of the numbers in M&S who already possess certain broad category skills, for instance in a Premier division football team this could be the number of strikers, midfielders, defenders or goalkeepers. Or it could identify those who already have Premier division experience and those who are novices at that level.
The skills available
It may be helpful to identify the current skills held by the labour force and see how many of these are transferable (a skill used in one particular job may be transferable to another job). Looking at current available skills can help planning in order to predict how much training will be needed for future employment and whether any training or development will be needed at all.
Skills analysis
M&S needs to be sure it has the right number of people available at the right time but also with the right skills. The company, therefore, needs to assess its present supply of skills across the company’s workforces and to identify the sorts of skills it will require in the future.
A skills inventory of current employees will indicate those who have received recent training and those who will require training. It may be possible to meet the human resource requirements of the organisation by training and developing current staff rather than recruiting externally. (This is often a cheaper option and also helps to motivate people who are already working for the company).
Performance results
M&S will want to gather information about the level of performance of various categories of current employees. This sort of information may be collected in a quantitative form (e.g. numbers of items produced of acceptable quality, number of rejected items because of poor quality etc). In addition information may be collected that is of qualitative nature (e.g. information from appraisal interviews).
Promotion potential
Internal promotions will change the availability of existing resources. It is useful to know how many employees have the skills and aptitude for promotion to more demanding roles. In addition, it is useful to know how many employees have the potential, with suitable training, for promotion.
Age distribution and length of service
This is a very important factor for M&S because it is possible to have too many experienced workers and too many inexperienced workers within an organisation.
If M&S has too many experienced workers there is a danger that they will retire at similar times leaving the organisation in a chaos to sort out by recruiting more staff with no experience. It is therefore important for M&S to have a workforce of mixed ages so that the danger of experienced workers retiring at the same time is avoided. If the organisation has too many inexperienced workers it may show a slow progress of advancement in the business objectives which may influence employees to quit their job and look somewhere else offering them more job satisfaction.
Staff turnover
Staff turnover should be analysed in order to identify the reasons people leave M&S and to help it forecast future losses. A degree of staff turnover may be beneficial to the organisation, as fresh staff can be recruited, promotion channels may be opened up and it may allow for natural wastage when M&S is trying to reduce its workforce. Too high a level of staff turnover will mean that there will be high additional costs of staff replacement and recruitment, additional training costs and disruption to the quality of service or to production.
Conclusion
In conclusion I have found out the importance of analysis of labour market and its effect on HR planning. The employees are M&S biggest investment, they are the main aspect of driving the business forward, they are the closes people to costumers, they are the minds of business and therefore the biggest assets of the organisation. It effects the HR planning effectively because their responsibility is to recruit the right employees, keeping the cost to the minimum. Therefore the labour market information provides them with vital information which affects their plans of recruitment. However I have also realised that it isn’t only the current recruitment which benefits from the labour market information, it is also used for future prediction. HR planning must predict their employment situation in future periods, in order to prevent any errors with the availability of skills and employment.
