Recruitment and Selection Process of British Airways (BA)

Introduction:

Recruitment and Selection Process of British Airways (BA) will be evaluated in this report including their advantages. Human Resource Management is a detailed job of enhancing the quality of human capital in an organization through deploying the right strategies to recruit the right-fit employees, retaining them in a sustainable manner, training and improving human resources and many other activities related to managing people and their contribution to the company. This report will review the effectiveness of the HR functions and review the roles and responsibilities of HR functions within selected organization. This report has selected an organization: British Airways (BA), to contextualize the situations and to apply the concepts and functions of HRM. International Airlines Group (IAG) is the parent company of British Airways. British Airways is a UK-based airline company which operates business in 183 countries globally with 247 fleets (International Airlines Group, 2019). The company generated annual revenue of above €1.24 billion in 2019. British Airways (BA) strongly believes that its employees are the lifeblood of the progressive growth of the company.

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Purpose and functions of HRM of British Airways (BA)

The purpose or mission of Human Resource Management (HRM) in any organization is to enhance the human capital or workforce capabilities so that they can coordinate with each other to achieve corporate objectives and goals (Noe et al., 2018). HRM achieves such a mission by deploying the principles of HRM. The purpose of HRM plays great role in any organization because human capital or workforce determines the difference between a failed and a successful organization. Furthermore, recruiting human resources is an expensive job because newly recruited employees need to be train to orient to the organization. In this case, HR plays great role in recruiting talents and to retain such talents.

The below section has analysed the functions of Human Resource Management at British Airways.

HR plans for future HR strategies: Planning for future HR strategies is important for sustainable business (Alfes et al., 2013). For example, what skills and qualities employees of British Airways (BA) should have after ten years should be determined now. Accordingly, HR needs to coordinate with another department for effective training programs to meet future plans. In such a situation, HR needs to coordinate closely with other departments to understand the business plans and marketing plans. Such collaboration helps BA to build a sustainable competitive advantage.

HR attracts and recruits best-fit talents: HR does so by attracting and selecting the best-fit talents in accordance with the business nature and business needs. HR plays the leading role in attracting the talent pool to apply for the available positions, and again HR takes part in selecting the best candidates.

HR does succession planning: It refers to Succession or career planning in which HR nurtures and promotes promising candidates to higher positions (Noe et al., 2015). It plays an important role because such retained employees are less likely to leave BA, and they know the culture and work environment. Thus, HR plays a great role in career planning.

Job evaluation, providing incentives and ensuring rewards/penalties: Periodical job evaluation, ensuring rewards or penalties are critically important jobs to any HR (Mudor, 2011). Human resource at BA evaluates the performance of employees, and provides incentives and rewards to deserving candidates. It also penalizes employees who disobey the organization’s rules and laws.

Employee engagement, training, and mentoring: Human resource department at BA takes a number of approaches and actions to engage employees through training and respective mentoring employees. HR arranges in-housed, outside training, and distance learning through using e-tools to enhance the capabilities and skills of employees. Mentoring is a long-term program in which the human resource department establishes a causal relationships with employees and provides advices. All these make employees more engaged in their work.

Employee wellness, safety, and health standards: Employee wellness and safety and maintaining health standards are closely associated with HR functions (DeCenzo, Robbins, & Verhulst, 2016). HR at British Airways need to ensure employee well-being, and workplace safety. BA believes that the workforce is the lifeblood of the organization because they play the most vital role both in the offices and in the air. Thus, HR ensures that their employees are safe and well.

Strengths and weaknesses of different approaches to recruitment and selection in British Airways (BA)

Recruitment refers to the whole process and approaches related to informing and attracting potential candidates to apply for a job, whilst selection is a part of the whole process. Selection implies screening the resumes, taking examinations, assessing the candidates through different methods and finally selecting the employees (Albrecht et al., 2015). BA has a number of approaches to recruitment and selection; some of the approaches are evaluated below:

Approaches to attracting candidates: BA has different available options to reach candidates and attract them to apply for different positions. Formal job advertisements, announcements from websites, and campaigns at relevant universities or colleges are some effective and popular approaches to attracting candidates (Armstrong & Taylor, 2020). The formal job advertisement approach is a conventional approach to attracting candidates. It is expensive because it requires posting ads in newspapers; however, this approach generates a good volume of potential candidates as well as less-qualified candidates. In contrast, recruitment campaigns at selected universities and colleges play an important role because it is much cost efficient and generates a large volume of quality candidates compared to the previous approach. However, this approach ignores potential candidates from other universities.

Use of social media to assess candidates: Given the widespread use of social media globally, many companies have adopted social media to assess the candidates’ profiles by evaluating their activities on social media (Kramar, 2014). The positive side of this approach is that it provides British Airways (BA) an excellent option to know the personality of the candidates, and their activities before finally selecting for recruitment. However, this approach has severe risks in terms of breach of privacy laws. If the candidate comes to know that his personal account was assessed by a company for external assessment, the candidate can sue the company in a court of justice. Thus, if the company really wants to review the candidates on social media, it should be done carefully.

Approaches to resume screening and to shortlist: Usually, companies receive a large volume of resumes for certain positions, sometimes ten times or even more than the required positions, which has made screening and shortlisting important (Boxall & Purcell, 2011). Still, BA can shortlist candidates manually or through machines. Manually shortlisting means reviewing each resume carefully and deciding if individuals should be called upon next process. It is time-consuming. However, it is rewarding as well because no potential candidates are removed from the process. On the other hand, machine shortlisting assess resumes based on certain criteria, which might cause many potential candidates to remove from the next process. Nonetheless, this approach is much more tech-savvy and cost and time efficient.

Approaches to interviews: A company has a number of options when it comes to interviews which means assessing the qualities, education, and professional qualifications and skills of candidates (Renwick, Redman, & Maguire, 2013). Online interviews and physical interviews are the two most commonly used approaches BA can follow. Online interview is much more convenient cost efficient. However, it has some disadvantages, such as the interviewer cannot explore the full details of candidates through the online interviews because of the psychological distance between them. In contrast, in-person interview opens the opportunity for BA to explore the topic in detail of the candidates. However, it is time-consuming.

Benefits of different HRM practices for both employers and employees

HRM practices can greatly help a company to achieve the best-fit pool of employees. This section has evaluated the contributions of different HRM practices at BA for both employees and employers.

HR’s plans for future HR strategies help sustainable growth: HR’s plans for sustainable business growth significantly help BA to assess future perspectives. Such preparation for the future plays a significant role in equipping the employees with the skills needed to be adept and efficient in the future (Bratton & Gold, 2017). This is certainly beneficial both for the employees and for the company itself. Employees get an advantage from the situation because they can enhance their skills; on the other hand, the employers also are benefited because employees can make better returns with advanced skills.

Effectively recruiting best-fit talents helps BA to achieve corporate objectives: Recruiting best-fit talents is important because this process helps to recruit employees with passion and potential who can explore working with the company (Jackson et al., 2011). Such efficient recruitment helps employees to explore their full potential. Similarly, BA itself will be highly benefited because such best-fit employees can play a greater role than those conventional most qualified employees whose passion might not necessarily match with those of the organization. Thus, best fit is important.

HR’s succession planning promotes internal promotion and growth: Succession or career planning is potential for any company because it promotes talent nurture inside the organization rather than recruiting new talents from external sources (Chelladurai & Kerwin, 2018). Therefore, it encourages BA to develop inside talents in a sustainable manner, and such talented employees are less likely to quit the company. This is similarly better than the company itself because it gets a pool of talented and retained employees.

Job evaluation, providing incentives and ensuring rewards motivate employees: Employees are motivated when they are treated fairly and equally, and provided with the right rewards and incentives (Jiang et al., 2012). Therefore, ensuring proper Job evaluation, providing incentives and ensuring rewards play a great roles at BA in motivating employees largely. Motivated employees perform better than average employees. As a result, such a motivated pool of employees helps BA to implement its corporate objectives.

Training and mentoring enhance employee engagement: Employees become engaged when they enjoy their work, and they can enjoy their work if the company takes initiative to train and mentor them for their skill and capability enhancement (Guest, 2011). Therefore, employee engagement programs through training and mentoring is beneficial both for employees and for British Airways because trained employees can contribute significantly to the company.

Apart from the above, employee wellness, safety, and health standards build a rewarding work environments and this also plays a role in the overall improvement of the organization.

Effectiveness of different HRM practices in terms of raising profits and productivity

In the above section, a number of HRM practices have been discussed, and all of them play a role in increasing organizational productivity, which leads to increased profitability. This section shows how HRM practices lead to organizational productivity and profitability.

Firstly, HR’s plans for future strategies make a company strategically strong from the inside where employees are equipped with skills (Budhwar & Debrah, 2013). These employees know great details of their professional and technical job areas; these help them to increase productivity because trained employees can do a job efficiently with fewer expenses money, time and resources. As a result, British Airways will soon experience more profits.

Secondly, HR’s plan to recruit best-fit talents, instead of the most qualified talents, help British Airways to source a pool of talented employees who match the passion and interest of the company. Such passionate and talented employees can make better performance to enhance organizational productivity because they will give their best to the company. As a result, the profits of British Airways will increase.

Thirdly, HR’s succession planning promotes internal talents because the company emphasizes nurturing existing employees rather than external ones (Mello, 2014). British Airways gets great organizational productivity through this HR functions because these employees are retained ones who know the culture, work process and thus, they can get jobs done most efficiently. As a result, both productivity and profits increase.

Finally, Job evaluation, providing incentives and ensuring rewards, training, and mentoring enhance employee engagement and motivation (Jiang et al., 2012). As a result, British Airways get engaged and motivated employees who can certainly contribute to enhanced organizational productivity because engaged and motivated employees work to achieve the organizational vision. This also leads to profit maximization.

Importance of employee relations with respect to influencing HRM decision making

Employee relations refer to the extent of the relationship between the employees and the owner of the company or the management committee (Wright & McMahan, 2011). Employee relations can be either positive or negative. Congenial, healthy relationships and constructive feedback are the backbones of good employee relationships which is the goal for most strategic companies. In contrast, poor employee relationship refers to the conflicting relationships between the employees and the management committee of the company. Poor employee relations are not desirable by most companies. However, many companies fail to maintain a healthy and congenial employee relationships. Su & Wright (2012) revealed that employee relationships significantly affects a company in making HR decisions in a specific ways.

Healthy and congenial employee relationship is built on constructive feedback, and proper evaluation, and they lead to good employee relations (Armstrong, 2010). Such congenial and positive employee relations imply that the company does not make one-sided decisions, it also implies that the decision is mutually agreed upon. Mutual agreement and congenial relationship with top management lead to a friendly work environment where constructive feedback is a regular practice. HR of British Airways can make decisions in an excellent manner in the such a work environment because all can provide in-depth and open feedback. Thus, HR can make a development plan based on the received feedback.

An important benefit of good employee relations is that it reduces employee conflicts and ensures a proactive and enriched work atmosphere (Nickson, 2013). This is highly beneficial for the HR decision-making process because a conflicting and contradictory work environments would force HR personnel to spend much of their time solving problems among conflicting parties. Thus, much of their time would be wasted. In contrast, good employee relationship has saved much of their time from the time being wasted otherwise. Thus, the HR of British Airways now has plenty of time to plan for skills development, and thinking about future HR strategies and actions. This is how good employee relations helped the HR of BA to invest their time in a productive way.

Key elements of employee Legislation and their impact on HRM decision making

UK employment legislations have a huge impact on decision-making for every company operating in the UK. This section has assessed the impact of such legislation on HRM decision-making.

Before recruitment: UK employment legislations declare that it is the responsibility of the employers to check credentials such as personal details, ability to work in the UK, criminal records and social media checks (Worthy, 2010). Thus, the HR of British Airways must check the above details before recruiting someone for a position. The company has to obey the rules; it cannot recruit someone who fails to meet the legislation even if the candidate is the best fit for the company.

Protecting private data: This age of technological advancement has enabled companies to store potential data such as medical reports, biometric prints, personal contact details and so on of both existing employees and those who have come across the evaluation stage. UK employment legislation has directed UK companies to strictly maintain the privacy of all employees and candidates (Parutis, 2014). The law strictly forbids the use of personal data for commercial reasons or for any reasons which was not the primary intention. Such a law has influenced the HR of BA to take stringent actions to save the data.

Working hours: UK has specific working hours, such as the employment legislations declaring that an employee should work 8 hours a day and not more than 48 hours a  week (Algan et al., 2010). This legislation provide a strong message to the HR of BA that it cannot force its employees to work more than 48 hours a week.

Paying Equally: UK employment legislation also requires employees not to discriminate against genders while deciding payment (Leyland, 2016). This implies that two people should get equal pay for working at the same level regardless of their gender. This informs BA that it should not make any discrimination of payment based on gender.

Health and safety measures: The legislation related to health and safety describes that employees should be provided with safety measures while working, and they should be assured of mental health (Marinescu, 2011). British Airways has the legal duty to ensure the health and safety of employees.

Conclusion:

HRM practices are compiled based on organizational objectives. HRM plays a critical role in any organization to achieve corporate and business objectives. Such functions also help British Airways significantly. HRM practices are highly associated with corporate objectives, which implies that the HR of British Airways need to work closely with another department to fix their HR plans and strategies. For example, BA has the corporate objectives to ensure excellent customer experience at every service point. HR of the company has to play a significant role in complying with these objectives. Accordingly, HR takes a wide range of HR strategic plans to empower and engage employees through training and mentorship programs. HR has different approaches and methods to recruitment and selection and many of them have been changing in a significant manner. For example, the conventional approach to attracting employees is being replaced by innovative and targeted employee hunting, which significantly reduces cost and efforts in recruitment and selection. Additionally, companies have become much more serious about protecting the rights of employees through enhancing the good and congenial employee relations.

References:

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