This week, we will be reading and talking about effective practices for workforce planning and new employee recruitment, interviewing and selection.

You'll see from reading Chapter 5 of the course text that workforce planning, or personnel planning, is the first step and helps an organization to determine what they actually need for 'people and positions' in their workforce. This is how organizations ensure that they have the right people, in the right positions, at the right time to support organizational success!

After planning comes the actual hiring process (Chapter 7). I often tell managers, and other colleagues who are invited to participate in the hiring process, that hiring new employees is one of the most important processes for ensuring effective operations and meeting organizational goals and objectives. It's important to take this process extremely seriously.

As a bit of follow up to our discussion from last week - about managing a diverse workforce - I've also provided the supplemental article on unconscious bias in the recruitment and selection process (Beattie & Johnson, 2012). We are all human so we all hold a set of bias and stereotypes about others who are different from ourselves. This is normal. Everyone has biases. The challenge is to ensure that we are aware of our biases so that we don't let them inappropriately influence our evaluation and assessment of others in the workplace - and this is particularly relevant in the recruitment, selection and hiring process. I've also included a supplemental article on how workforce diversity can improve business performance (Jayne & Dipboye, 2004)

discuss about it