Strategic Workforce Management: Recruitment, Planning, and Decision Making

Posted on Aug 22, 2025 in International Business Economics

Recruitment Strategies

Employers should search to locate candidates with the necessary requirements to perform the job offered.

Internal Recruitment

Searches within their own company for the best people to fill the position.

Benefits

  • Saves time and money
  • Boosts employee motivation
  • Fast process

Disadvantages

  • If a mistake is made, it can decrease confidence and motivation.
  • Greatly reduces the number of candidates.

External Recruitment

Employers look outward in search of a larger number of candidates. Various sources and methods can be used:

Methods

  1. Advertisements: Advertising through newspapers, internet job boards, and other communication channels.
  2. Talent Pools/Databases: Records maintained by agencies or organizations, containing relevant data from individuals who belong or have belonged to that body.
  3. Placement Agencies: Entities that assist businesses in finding the most suitable candidates for their needs, such as temporary employment agencies (ETT).
  4. Competitors (Poaching): Attracting workers from other companies, often with an economic incentive. Disadvantages: This practice raises ethical concerns, and there’s a risk of reciprocal actions from competitors.
  5. Recommendations: Current employees are asked if they know individuals who meet the required profile and are available for work.
  6. Unsolicited Applications: Individuals seeking employment submit their resumes directly. If well-organized, this can create a large database for future staffing needs.
  7. Andalusian Employment Service (SAE): The body managing employment policies for the Junta de Andalucía. Its functions include promoting employment and training, recording job demands, and acting as an intermediary.

Human Resources Planning

Human Resources Management

The goal is to find the most suitable employees for each position, ensuring they have sufficient training to perform their work efficiently and achieve organizational objectives. Companies identify, classify, process, and evaluate information on the knowledge accumulated by their workers.

Planning Stages

A) Situational Analysis

Gathering information of all kinds relevant to HR planning.

B) Staffing Requirements Forecasts

Estimating the number of staff the company will need to incorporate in the coming years, predicting future staffing requirements.

C) Job Analysis and Career Design

Establishing the characteristics of jobs that new workers will occupy and defining their potential career trajectory within the company over the coming years.

D) Recruitment, Selection, and Training

This involves finding the most suitable candidate (recruitment), choosing the most appropriate one (selection), and developing ways to increase the technical capacity necessary to perform the job (training).

E) Control

Utilizing valuation and performance measurement techniques to monitor individual performance, also for budgetary control.

The Decision Matrix and Criteria

To simplify decision-making, a decision matrix is often used. This is a double-entry table where rows represent different alternatives (strategies), and columns list possible scenarios with their corresponding probabilities of occurrence, if known. The elements within the matrix correspond to the results obtained when a specific strategy is employed in a given scenario.

A) Decision Making Under Certainty

In this situation, we know the alternative that provides the best outcome.

B) Decision Making Under Risk

We do not know exactly what will happen, but we can assign probabilities to each outcome. Each expected result is multiplied by its probability and summed to obtain expected values; the alternative with the highest expected value is chosen.

C) Decision Making Under Uncertainty

In this case, the probabilities of occurrence for each scenario are unknown, requiring a subjective decision. Three common criteria are:

  1. Pessimistic Criterion (Maximin): Identify the worst possible outcome for each strategy and choose the strategy whose worst outcome is the best among all worst outcomes.
  2. Optimistic Criterion (Maximax): Identify the most favorable outcome for each strategy and choose the strategy whose best outcome is the best among all best outcomes.
  3. Laplace Criterion (Rationalist): Assign an equal probability to each scenario and then proceed as if making a decision under risk, calculating expected values based on these assumed probabilities.