The position of the person chosen for this interview is a Human Resource Manager. However, he is also referred to by many other names in this institution as some prefer to call him “Talent Manager”. He is generally in charge of the human resources of this organization or the people who work there. He oversees their hiring as well as the cases of leaving of any employee. The organization operates in a service industry dealing with financial services.
Answers
- What kind of qualifications a person in your department should have that would make them more successful in the HRD field? You should generally be very good in interpersonal skills.
- How often does your department do training? We conduct capacity building sessions quarterly every year for the last ten years.
- What challenges do you face during the recruiting and retention process? During recruitment very many qualified candidates turn up. Our main problem is to come up with inclusion-exclusion criteria.
- What courses from your education that are outside of the HR field would you say have been the biggest assets to you while in the HR field? ICT is very useful as it is becoming a lifestyle; many servicesare computerized nowadays.
- How often does your Human Resources Department, update training materials? We prefer to do it on a quarterly basis so as to harmonize it with our capacity building programs.
- Do you have any experience training employees for global employment? Yes I do, the organization I work for is a multinational company,
- How do you determine if training is needed to remedy a problem? We evaluate the performance of an employee well and determine whether a certain skills needed for him to do a job well are missing and he needs training or whether it is a case of laxity.
- What do you do when an employee has completed the provided required training, but remains incompetent in that skill? We are a service-oriented company with the aim of becoming the best in our area of practice. Unfortunately, for this reason and as a matter of policy, such employees may not find place to work in our company, because they cannot meet the requisite criteria, and we have to drop them off.
- What training skills or disciplinary actions do you take when an employee is failing in some aspect of their job? We give them warnings and motivate them to do better in their work. If this call goes unheeded, we might be forced to terminate our cooperation with them.
- When recruiting, do you promote from within or do you prefer recruiting from outside your company and why? We are open-minded and flexible. Our goal is to get competent employees; where we feel they are, there we will go and source them.
- What type of legal issues do you face on a daily basis? They are numerous. You can even get dragged to court for not observing labor laws and giving the employees their leave in a timely manner.
- If there was anything you could change about your position, what would it be and why? Aah not much, probably be allowed to be more independent so that I can be able to do my job of securing the rights of the employees without the fear or favor.
- What is the most difficult situation that you have been faced with as a HRD professional? How did you analyze the situation? How was the situation corrected? When I had to decide whether the employees were to work on weekends so that the company could be able to handle a spike in demand of services and achieve its targets that was hard for me. I resolved it by keeping the weekend hours open to anyone who was willing and introducing an appropriate rate of weekend hours pay. It worked well. All the employees turned up, and we did not infringe on their rights.
- What are the most important aspects of your job? Observance of labor laws. Those can really make your work a headache. What with numerous court battles?
- What is your biggest day to day training challenge? New information is coming up so fast in this age, and unless you are an avid reader, it is easy for you to be overtaken by events.
- What performance improvement project are you working on currently? I want to enroll for an Executive MBA course.
- How do you design a motivation that can last longer to address the issue of turnover? Let people be paid by the value they have injected into the business. This motivates them to work for their gains and at the same time for the company. Strike two birds with one stone.
- What do you think is the most challenging issue facing the HRD field today? Numerous government regulations and half-baked professionals who are not able to deliver quality work.
- Have you found that certain methods (internet/online, teleconferences, face-to- face, handouts, Power Point presentations, etc.) work well than others in training? I would say that in a normal curve, people have their preferences and there is a preferred method for a particular audience. I have to look into such statistics however.
- What have you found to be the most popular reward for employees? The best employee award of the year. This one causes ripples I tell you.