What Is the HR Management Process? How to Build a Standard Process for Your Business?

Vũ Khôi

Author at Wotech Electronics Blog

The larger and more complex the scale and nature of production/business operations, and when the owner can no longer manage the activities of all employees well, the HR manager becomes the solid bridge between employees and the company's shared objectives. So how should managers build an HR management process that is highly effective and meets the needs of the business? Follow the article below with SimERP.

What Is the HR Management Process?

Human resource management is the reasonable and most effective exploitation, use, and management of a company's workforce. Since employees are a company's most valuable asset, HR management is a necessary activity for every business in any field, not just commerce.

To manage human resources effectively, an indispensable activity for managers is building a sensible HR management process, including smart recruitment, training, development, proper human resource planning, and the rules/activities that connect employees to the company's shared goals.

How to Build an HR Management Process in a Company

HR management is an important activity in any business — and also a hard problem that managers rack their brains over when looking for an effective management solution. Depending on the business model, the organizational structure, and the different management approaches, each company will have a different HR management process.

In general, the HR management process includes the following basic activities:

Stage 1: Establishing HR regulations and recruitment systems

HR management regulations

Building sensible, suitable policies plays an important role in fostering a good relationship between employees and company leadership. Depending on many factors, each business will have different management regulations, but in general they all aim to ensure that company employees have a comfortable mindset, work in a safe, positive environment, and receive full material benefits.

These regulations include:

• Recruitment policy: based on three components — the selection policy, the new-employee orientation policy, and the probation policy.

• Training and human resource development policy: established to enhance capabilities and improve the quality of the workforce through drafting and implementing training and development plans aligned with the company's direction.

• Compensation and salary policy: includes the salary and bonus policy (benefits for employees, payment methods, pay cycles, etc.), the number of public holidays, leave, and travel and resort regimes.

Proper management regulations help a business avoid risks that could arise in management work, ensure the company complies with the law, and good incentive policies with staff will help the company attract more talent.

The system of internal regulatory documents

An important, indispensable activity in any HR management process is building the system of internal regulatory documents in the business. This system comprises the overall set of rules, processes, regulations, and documents that are generally binding within each business, each field of activity, or each specific behavior.

The internal document system consists of the following 2 types:

• Institutional documents: including policies, regulations, rules, processes, guidelines, and handbooks.

• Individual documents: including ordinary individual documents (appointments, decisions, official letters, announcements, internal rules, etc.) and professional exchange documents (official letters, announcements, reports, minutes, proposals, projects, business letters, etc.).

Building a proper system of internal regulatory documents is important because it is regarded as the legal framework supporting governance and the management of operations, enabling leaders to manage at a macro level without interfering too deeply in each person's work, and helping the internal staff coordinate activities and adjust their own behavior and thinking appropriately in the course of work.

Building and developing corporate culture

Corporate culture is the whole set of cultural values built up throughout the company's survival and development. They become important rules and conventions in every activity of the business; at the same time, corporate culture governs the behavior and thinking of every member of the organization in pursuing and fulfilling the company's purposes.

Each business has a different formation process and development direction, so corporate culture creates differentiation from other businesses. However, creating that differentiation must rest on 2 factors:

• Mission and vision: including the stage-by-stage goals the business sets throughout its operation.

• The current values the company holds: including the workforce, the working environment, the style and methods of working, customers, and communication culture.

To build a positive corporate culture that supports a more effective HR management process, the following steps are needed:

• Define the viewpoints, objectives, and business direction.

• Draft and build the various aspects of the business by unifying a code of conduct for everyone in the company, including regulations, rules, slogans, vision, mission, core values, business philosophy, and the workforce.

• Evaluate the implementation of the corporate culture.

• Consolidate and adjust the aspects of the corporate culture as appropriate.

Stage 2: Executing the HR management process

Step 1: Recruiting staff

This is the first activity and plays an important role in the business's HR management process. Depending on the position being recruited, professional requirements, and the company's structure and rules, this process is applied flexibly and may differ between companies, without a single common framework.

Managers need to build a tight, consistent recruitment process to achieve high recruiting effectiveness, with the following common steps:

• Recruitment planning: the position to be recruited, how long recruitment will take, requirements for candidates, and so on.

• Job announcement: drafting the recruitment announcement and choosing the mass media channels to run it.

• Collecting and screening applications: selecting the applications that best fit the position and planning interviews.

• Preliminary interview: scheduling appointments with the shortlisted candidates to re-confirm the information in their applications and continue eliminating those that do not meet requirements.

• Testing: testing candidates' professional competence through tests tailored to the requirements of the position.

• Selection interview: gathering more information about the candidate and negotiating salary, bonuses, and company benefits.

• Probation trial: the candidate must go through real challenges during the probation period so the employer can assess whether they meet the job's needs.

• Hiring decision: the employer chooses the most suitable candidate, proceeds with signing the contract, and explains and answers the candidate's questions.

Step 2: Training and developing human resources

In practice, competition between businesses is in essence competition over the quality of human resources. Recognizing that importance, training and human resource development is regarded as a long-term investment strategy and is carried out in a planned, coordinated way.

Through it, employees will better understand the nature of their work, master and update many new necessary knowledge and skills. This way, employees will have a stronger sense of responsibility and motivation to work, and a greater ability to adapt to a changing technological environment and shifting job requirements — and thus greater opportunities for advancement.

Doing this well requires the business to have an effective training and human resource development process. The process includes the following steps:

Identify training needs

There are 3 approaches to identifying specific training needs:

• Organizational-level analysis: includes identifying the support and backing from leaders and colleagues, the organization's strategy, and the resources available for training.

• Task-level analysis: includes developing a list of tasks and identifying the knowledge, skills, and attitudes required for the job.

• Individual-level analysis: through evaluating work results, knowledge, capabilities, and attitudes of each individual, this helps reveal the various issues in training work.

To assess training needs, several different methods can be used, such as interviews, survey questionnaires, tests, analyzing problems of the working group, and reviewing work reports and evaluating work results.

Correctly identifying training goals and needs improves the effectiveness of training and human resource development, enabling employees to develop and demonstrate their individual abilities to meet the job's exact needs.

Build the training program

A training program is a system of courses and lectures that conveys the right knowledge and skills employees need, aligned with the training goals that have been set. When designing a training program, consider the following factors:

• Identify the right training content and organize and classify it into a suitable system.

• Establish principles around feedback, practice, the meaning of the training for employees, participation, and the application of what is learned.

• Consider a number of trainees appropriate to the training program.

• Consider the organization's constraints — finances, teaching staff, time, and the necessary facilities — to decide whether to train in-house or externally.

• Identify training methods suited to different training content, including information-reception training, skills training, and training to change communication skills and attitudes.

Carry out the training

The goal of the training process is to change and improve trainees' knowledge, skills, behavior, and attitudes. Different goals and levels of training call for different suitable methods:

• Training managers and specialists: the case study method, the conference method, internships, audio-visual techniques, management games, behavior modeling, in-basket training, and so on.

• Training production staff / operational staff: apprenticeship training, on-the-job coaching, formal training, or the use of simulation equipment, and so on.

Evaluate the training program

The final step in the training and human resource development process is evaluating the results of the training program after implementation, by examining the following:

• Learners' reactions and attitudes.

• Learning outcomes.

• How the learning outcomes are applied.

• The impact of the training results on the organization.

• Trainees' future learning needs.

Step 3: Human resource planning

Carried out in parallel with the training and human resource development process, human resource planning plays an important role in systematically considering workforce needs in order to draw up plans that ensure recruiting, training, and deploying the right people, meeting the job's exact needs at the right time to achieve the organization's objectives.

A proper planning process increases coordination among people in the organization around the shared goals that have been set, raises work productivity, and forecasts the organization's future workforce needs.

The human resource planning process consists of the following steps:

Forecast workforce needs

Managers need to determine the following:

• Specific, clear business objectives.

• The work, business, and production activities that need to be carried out.

• The details of the products and services to be produced and the scale of implementation.

From this data, determine the number of employees needed for each position, the quality of employees (qualities, skills) to meet the job's exact needs, and the time when the business needs that workforce.

Analyze the current state of the workforce

This is the step where the business analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of its existing workforce in order to make wise adjustment decisions, by examining the following:

• On the system level: examining the number and quality of employees (skills, experience, qualities, capabilities), examining the organizational structure (type of activity, responsibilities, authority, relationships), and human resource management policies.

• On the process level: examining employees' job satisfaction, management style, working environment, and the activities and challenges in human resource management.

Make workforce adjustment decisions

After a clear analysis, managers need to compare workforce needs with the company's current workforce situation to make decisions and propose suitable workforce adjustment solutions, avoiding both a surplus and a shortage of staff.

Draw up an implementation plan

Once a sensible adjustment plan is in place, the manager proceeds to implement the activities related to the recruitment plan, the plan to restructure the organization, promotion opportunities, and a workforce reduction plan in an appropriate way that does not cause employee dissatisfaction.

Evaluate the plan

The final step in human resource planning is to re-evaluate the results of implementing the plan in relation to any errors that arose compared with the original goals, analyze the causes, propose solutions, and plan lessons learned and adjustments for future planning efforts.

HR management is not an easy job — it requires managers to continuously learn professional knowledge and develop the necessary skills through the real-world HR situations that arise in the business. With the insights above on how to build an HR management process in a company, SimERP hopes you will have the information you need and apply it appropriately.

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