Performance Management For Competitive Environment – Haigh’s Chocolate Case Study

Recruitment Process

Discuss about the Performance Management For Competitive Environment.
 

Managing human resources in today’s competitive environment is becoming more and more complex as well as significant (Brouer et al.2015). An effective process of performance outcomes observation is essential to provide employee encouragement (Cummings and Worley 2014). Therefore recruitment process and employee performance appraisal are the most concerning and sensitive issue for nay business process.

Haigh’s Chocolate is the Australian confectionery company known as a chocolate seller, successfully satisfies consumers from Victoria, South Australia and New South Wales (Haighschocolates.com.au 2016). The company previously faced many difficulties to manage people within the factory. Many of the researcher identified that performance of the employees has not being assessed accurately. The complete focus of the employee assessment was “the person” including characterizations of their personal “traits”- behavior, knowledge, however, they has not been measured the actual output. Few of the researchers identified that the management of the company are responsible for gathering infrequent feedback. Generally, they resolve employee performance issues annually and thus an ineffective employee management program has been practiced by the management of Haigh’s Chocolate. Though the company is being flourished in different cities of Australia, large number of employees needs to be recruited mentioning proper job requirements and resolving exiting performance e appraisal issues.

Since the 100 years, the team of Haigh’s is responsible for production of premium chocolates. The skilled employees are recruited and delivered assigned job responsibilities to their best (Jiang et al. 2012). The company has selected their suitable candidates offering existing career opportunities across Manufacturing, Corporate, and Retail areas.  Furthermore, the company provides a strong focus on career progression through continual training program process and development (Haighschocolates.com.au 2016). However, many researchers confirmed that the training programs of the company are not updated or improvised on regular interval. Hence, employees find the system of training process ineffective and inefficient.

Haigh’s Chocolates embraces diversity and encourages applications from people with diversity. Many people are recruited from outside the country and the company provides a comfortable workplace to attain the best performance from all their recruited members (Haighschocolates.com.au 2016). However, the company faced problem to manage people who are from different backgrounds.

Selection of suitable candidates is always a vital process. In the current ongoing recruitment process, the company follows the following steps:

Step 1

Searching: Initially, the company posts their job vacancies in their official website address. Different types of vacancies are posted mentioning specified job details. The job seekers  are applied for suitable job within specified time.

Performance Appraisal

Step 2

Short listing: After the initial screening, the company is shortlisted certain candidates for a particular openings. The company matches the job specification with the candidate’s profile. Here the qualification and past experiences are considers the most important attributes by the human resource department of the company.

Step 3:

Screening: Screening is the integral part of the recruitment process (Kehoe and Wright 2013). Job specification is invaluable in screening. Applications received in response to invitation are called up for personal interview where managers are interacted with the shortlisted candidates. After this screening process, the human resource department of Haigh’s Chocolate selected the right candidates.

Step 4

Performance appraisal: Performance standards are all about setting up of the standards which are generally used to as the base to compare the actual performance (Rummler and Brache 2012). Here the management follows the below mentioned performance appraisal process which are conducted on yearly basis:

Diagram 1: Current Performance Appraisal Process of Haigh’s Chocolate

(Source: Haighschocolates.com.au 2016).

Human resource management has the obvious sense of getting things done through people
(Van der Velden and Humburg 2014). This is a critical part of very manager’s responsibility, however, many organizations finds it beneficial to establish a specialist division to offer an expert service dedication for ensuring that the department of human resource is performed in an efficient manner. The recruitment KPIs defines the main areas which need to be measured in the process of recruitment. Here the company emphasized four performance standards. These include:

Task completion time: The management has assigned task to a particular employees and give the deadline to accomplish such task. It is being evaluated by the human resource department to accomplish the task by each employee. Accomplishing the task within the deadline, employees are getting appraisal. However, such appraisal process is being evaluated by the management on annual basis.

Communication skill: Haigh’s Chocolate has been expanded their business in the international level. Many people are recruitment from the outside of Australia. Thus communication proficiency has been considered as one of the key performance indicators of the company.

Team management ability: Handling a team in the most effective manner is essential to deliver the best performance of employees. In the chocolate manufacturing process, several teams are actively participated and contributed to accomplish the task such as Manufacturing, Retail and Corporate teams. Head of the departments of each department are evaluated performance standard of employees based on the team management skill. 

Specification of the Performance Standards (KPI’s)

Assigned people as per specified job are one of the prime roles of the management (Mowday, Porter and Steers 2013). Being a prominent seller in the confectionery industry of Australia, the company provides many job opportunities in the chocolate manufacturing process. Jobs are specified as per the department’s requirements. For the manufacturing process, the company provides opportunities for certain roles. It includes Production Planning executives, Quality controller, Manufacturing process engineers, Supervision of Factory, Junior/senior design managers and many others.

• Sampling planning
• Planning of the production and schedule of products
• Packaging material shortages to material department for the next accounting period and ensured released materials available of production
• Maintain Co-ordination and follow up with materials, quality operation
• Coordinating contract manufacturing locations and Third party locations
• Management of sales inventory

Being a shift in-charge, Quality controller of Haigh’s Chocolate maintains the following job specification:

• Checking and reviewing of analytical report
• Preparation of standard operating procedure within the work place of Haigh’s
• End-product verification by reviewing the required specification

On the other hand, people recruited in the retail department of Haigh’s Chocolate are recruited in the various job profiles like Sales Executives, General Manager in Sales and Junior/Senior floor salesman.

• Visit relevant outlets to achieve target of sales
• Coordination with distributors of Haigh’s to ensure the adequate infrastructure and maintain the level of service in market
• Responsibility should be handled for achieving the secondary sales

• Keep records of product demands in the market
• Maintain the store discipline
• Reporting on plan versus action to management
• Implement the system of quality

In case of corporate responsibility dealings, Haigh’s Chocolate recruits’ people in various job profile such as Finance Controller, Administrative Executives, Chef Executive Officer, and Senior Personal Performance Manager and so on. All these people are responsible for specific duties. For example, setting strategy and vision and building working culture of the company are the key job specification for the title of CEO. On the other hand, Finance Controller is responsible for handling finance in a most effective manner or to keep a close watch about the finance dealing of his/her subordinates. 

Seeking right people and assigning him/her to the right position is challenging but ever demanding (Giacalone and Rosenfeld 2013). Companies posts or publish advertisements for seeking suitable candidates for the organization. Various job advertisement methods are used for generating awareness for the openings. Such methods include newspaper advertisements, television commercials, targeted online jobsites, and social networking sites and so on. Haigh’s Chocolate prefers to post the current job openings at their website portal (Haighschocolates.com.au 2016). Thus, this has been evaluated that the company finds difficult to select their recruitments because the company hardly finds best skill people for their organization.

Arranging interviews is the main important aspects of recruiting. Interviewers can arrange interview by various ways such as “Face-to-Face personal interview”, “Online Interview”, Interview though Skype or video conferencing. Preferring face to face personal interview is being used by Haigh’s Chocolate in most of the cases. By this method of interview, the company restricts themselves to choose the right candidate from the overseas.

Collecting feedback from the applicants gives the opportunity to improve the recruitment process which may promise a better selection or better performance appraisal method for the new as well as existing employees of the organization (Rummler and Brache 2012). This has been recommended by many interviewers that at least one of the formal panels who attends can gather responses or feedback from the applicants to enhance the future interview procedures. To structuring the form of best feedback method, the company can do survey process. At the end of the recruitment process, applicants may fill up an ethical feedback form.

Job Specification

Conclusion with Recommendation

To improve the recruitment process of the company the following recommendation needs to be incorporated:

Firstly, the company should make a new recruitment process which is more constructive and systematic. The five steps needs to be included to make it an effective such as

Recruitment planning: Planning involves drafting a comprehensive job specification for the open position, outline the job responsibilities, set of preferred skilled, required qualifications, level of pay and so on.

Development strategy: The Company needs to develop a strategy whether candidates will be hire from local area or outside, method of interviews, selection procedures and so on.

Searching: The company can attract jobseeker’s attention by sourcing opportunities through internal or external. Internal source is website’s current opening site and external are many targeted job portals, online or newspaper commercials.

Screening: For an appropriate screening process, the company needs to consider different features like qualification, knowledge, skills, interest, experience, abilities and so on.

Evaluation and control: This is imperative because costs are considered for the recruitment process. 

Secondly, the performance appraisal procedure must be effective and should be reviewed on monthly basis. The way, the company can resolve performance management-related issues. For instance, Haigh’s Chocolate should change their performance appraisal process by following way:

(Source: Created by author)

Thirdly, the human resource department of the company needs to engage their employees in the training and development process to perform better.

In this way, the company, employee’s performance outcomes will be recognized and existing appraisal issues resolved. 

References:

Brouer, R.L., Stefanone, M.A., Badawy, R.L., Egnoto, M.J. and Seitz, S.R., 2015, January. Losing Control of Company Information in the Recruitment Process: The Impact of LinkedIn on Organizational Attraction. In System Sciences (HICSS), 2015 48th Hawaii International Conference on (pp. 1879-1888). IEEE.

Cummings, T. and Worley, C., 2014. Organization development and change. Cengage learning.

Giacalone, R.A. and Rosenfeld, P., 2013. Impression management in the organization. Psychology Press.

Haighschocolates.com.au. (2016). Home page – Haigh’s Chocolates. [online] Available at: https://www.haighschocolates.com.au [Accessed 8 Jun. 2016].

Jiang, K., Lepak, D.P., Han, K., Hong, Y., Kim, A. and Winkler, A.L., 2012. Clarifying the construct of human resource systems: Relating human resource management to employee performance. Human Resource Management Review, 22(2), pp.73-85.

Kehoe, R.R. and Wright, P.M., 2013. The impact of high-performance human resource practices on employees’ attitudes and behaviors. Journal of Management, 39(2), pp.366-391.

Mowday, R.T., Porter, L.W. and Steers, R.M., 2013. Employee—organization linkages: The psychology of commitment, absenteeism, and turnover. Academic Press.

Rummler, G.A. and Brache, A.P., 2012. Improving performance: How to manage the white space on the organization chart. John Wiley & Sons.

Shields, J., Brown, M., Kaine, S., Dolle-Samuel, C., North-Samardzic, A., McLean, P., Johns, R., Robinson, J., O’Leary, P. and Plimmer, G., 2015. Managing Employee Performance & Reward: Concepts, Practices, Strategies. Cambridge University Press.

Van der Velden, R. and Humburg, M., 2014. Skills and the graduate recruitment process: Evidence from two discrete choice experiments (No. 002). Maastricht University, Research Centre for Education and the Labour Market (ROA).