Critically discuss why Knowledge of the prevailing conditions in the Essay

Critically discuss why Knowledge of the prevailing conditions in the labour market is fundamental to the Human Resource Plann - Essay Example Human resource planning involves identifying the forecasts of labour demand and labour supply in the market. Some of the techniques that can be utilized in forecasting the labour requirement in the organisation include sales projections, managerial estimates, simulations and analysis of employee turnover in the organisation (Briscoe 2008). The human resource managers can utilize succession charts, labour market analysis, personnel ratios and skills inventories in forecasting the labour availability (Reddy 2005). This process is geared at ensuring that there is an adequate number of qualified persons at all the time to perform the jobs that aim at meeting the organisational objectives. Kleynhans asserts that â€Å"human resource planning is depended on the labour market outlook† (2006 p 69). Organisations are currently monitoring the skills in the labour market, the skills shortage and changing trends (Briscoe 2008). Some of the objective of human resource planning process is t o ensure there is enough manpower and proper utilization of manpower in the organisation (Dawra 2003). The process should forecast the future requirements of the human resources at all skills levels in the organisation and access the shortage or surplus at different periods. Another objective is to analyze the impact of changing work processes and technology on the human resource requirements and maximize the return on investment in the people resources. Since employees retire, resign or die, human resource planning process helps the organisation deal with employee turnover and meets both short term and long term people requirements in the organisation (Pattanayak 2005). Some factors that influence the process include the organisational business strategies, growth cycles, and time horizons, quality of human requirement forecasting information, environmental uncertainties and the nature of jobs in the organisation. Human resource planning will anticipate the redundancies, the recruit ment levels and determine the training needs in the organisation (Dawra 2003). Some commonly used methods of labour requirement forecasting include managerial judgments, work study methods, ratio-trend analysis and mathematical models (Reddy 2005). Labour supply in the organisation can be either internal or external. Internal sources of labour supply include promotions, job rotations and training the existing employees on new roles. External sources include the external labour market whereby employees can be employed from educational institutions, referrals and outsourcing (Pattanayak, 2005). Reviewing the human resource audits and making future projections can be utilized to understand the internal human resource supply (Reddy 2005). The internal human resource requirements can be affected by temporal absences, turnovers such as dismissals and resignations and also permanent absences such as death, retirements and disability (Mathis and Jackson, 2012). The simplest method of foreca sting the future human resource supply is the trend analysis that assumes that ratios of employee turnover and movements will be stable in the future. The labour patterns include retirement patterns and hiring patterns that assume the same patterns will remain stable and thus predict the future manpower requirements of the organisation. Another model of forecasting the