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Human resource management
Human Resource Management, 14th edition, provides students in human resource management courses and practicing managers with a full and practical introduction to human resource management concepts and techniques, with a focus on how to use those techniques to improve performance, productivity, and profitability at work. As this new edition goes to press, I feel even more strongly than I did when I wrote the first that all managers—not just HR managers—need a strong foundation in HR/ personnel management concepts and techniques to do their jobs effectively. You will therefore find an emphasis here on practical material you need to perform your day-to-day management responsibilities, even if you never spend a day as a human resource manager.
I focused this edition on performance, productivity, and profitability for two rea¬sons. First, companies must be competitive, and at the end of the day, competitive¬ness requires improved performance, productivity, and profitability.
Second, as I write this preface, the remnants of 2008's global recession continue to impede economic growth. For example, America's gross domestic product rose only about 1% on average from 2008 to 2013, well below the roughly 3% average for similar earlier periods. To boost performance, productivity, and profitability in the face of such weak demand, employers turned in part to human resource management. Many first instituted headcount cost controls. That helps explain why America's 59% employment-to-population ratio is down to where it was in the early 1980s. the 7 + % unemployment rate is at least 2% too high, and the ratio of wages to gross domestic product (about 44%) is well below average. But headcount cost controls did help employers,keep both after-tax profit margins (9.3%) and profits as a share of gross domestic product (about 11%) higher than in the past 50 years.
And as we'll see in this book, those headcount controls were just one of hundreds of HR techniques employers used to reduce costs and improve performance, produc¬tivity, and profitability, often while maintaining or improving employee relations, morale and engagement. A skill-based pay program at JLG Industries led to lower overall staffing levels, higher minimum hiring qualifications, increased productivity, and expanded plant capacity. One forest products company saved over $1 million over 5 years by investing about $50,000 in safety improvements and employee safety training. GE Medical used recruiting metrics such as "percentage interviews that lead to offers" to lower recruiting costs by 17%. In staffing its call centers, Xerox Corp. long hired applicants with call center experience. But after using special HR data analytics tools to analyze call center performance, it discovered that operator personality, not experience was the key. It now keeps hiring costs down and perfor¬mance up by using special software to screen for its almost 40,000 call center jobs.
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