Labor Inefficiencies

The Twenty First Century has been considered a time of labor confusion for the United States. The high wages commanded by factory workers appears to be on the decline as global competition overcomes American workers. Labor inefficiencies exist throughout much of the market as wage costs increase but skills decline. Companies may be creating large amounts of inefficiency as they ignore their labor strategies.

There are two main areas of labor inefficiency which include labor allocation and recruitment inefficiency. Labor allocation refers to how people are used in the workplace in terms of their ability to promote company objectives. Recruiting the wrong employees with the wrong skills is recruitment inefficiency. Both of these areas can costs company large sums of money.

Business simply cannot afford to spend time and money recruiting the wrong employees and then putting them to work in the wrong area. Corporations must work hard to make sure they are recruiting the proper skills among the working population and putting those skills to good use. The better they are able to do this the more likely they will achieve their objectives.

Labor Inefficiency: Each organization should have specific objectives that they want to achieve. These strategic objectives relate to the manner and method by which the organization is going to compete in the market. This may be in the field of excellent customer service, discount prices, superior products, etc... Each business defines their own strategic objectives.

Once these strategic objectives have been defined it is important to make sure that you have the proper labor allocated to each department that fulfills these objectives. For example, if you want strong customer service but you have a minimal people in that department and a maximum amount of people in human resources you will have no viable way to fulfill this objective.

Recruiting Efficiency: Recruiting efficiency relates to the ability of organizations to draw in the right talent and find candidates with the right skills. Employees must be more educated and more productive then they ever have been in their history before in order to master the new global world. Yet public education is dropping many kids before graduating from high school, literacy rates are declining and schools have been pumped full of social work concepts. The situation keeps getting worse.

Human Resource managers should focus on targeting their recruiting efforts to those areas where they are likely to find the most qualified candidates. Concepts such as personality, skills, and competency testing should be implemented in the workplace before recruiting. Making sure that job descriptions, strategic objectives, and recruiting policies are in line with each other is likewise important.