Taylor Transit and Hr Upgrade

Running head: TAYLOR TRANSIT AND HR UPGRADE

Taylor Transit and HR Upgrade

May Johnson

HRM/544

February 1, 2013

Susan McMillan

The owner of Taylor Transit, Mr. Rick Taylor, is upgrading our HR approach by incorporating employee selection tests, HRIS, and succession planning tools to assist HR in doing its job well and managing our recent expansion. This will enable Taylor Transit to be more competitive. As chairman of the committee tasked at analyzing various criteria to aid in choosing these HR tools, I am presenting the criteria identified for each tool chosen.

Selection or assessment tools will be the first Human Resource (HR) tool discussed here. Measuring intellectual ability and personality are excellent predictors of performance. People have vast differences in their productivity and using psychological assessments will help make selection of the right person much easier. Research has shown that predicting performance helps to us choose the best tools to choose the best people (Hirsh, 2009).

There is a "variability in performance across individuals" that gets larger as the work environment gets more complicated (Hirsh, 2009, par. 5). This variability can be examined as a "percentage of an average employee's output levels" (Hirsh, 2009, par. 5). The scale goes from zero variability (wherein every employee performs at the same level as every other employee), to a much higher number (which indicates a greater variability in performance of individual workers). Low skilled work would have a standard deviation of work output to average output at 19 per cent, and skilled at 32 per cent. The standard deviation for managers and professionals is more like 48 per cent. This tool could discern small gradations of difference in performance among candidates. These small differences could yield great differences in final output among talent (Hirsh, 2009).

The culture of an organization greatly affects what selection tools are used. To identify the best candidates, "meta-analyses of numerous validation studies across a variety of domains" must be employed, the most effective of which are tests of intelligence and personality (Hirsh, 2009, par. 13). Intelligence seems to reflect "an individual's ability to plan, reason, process information, and control his or her behaviour" and has been so throughout one hundred years of research (Hirsh, 2009, par. 14). It does it even better than skill aptitude tests. The second best predictor of performance is personality, so this is another excellent tool for predicting employee success. The dimensions of personality that are useful are: openness, emotional stability, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and extraversion. Conscientiousness is considered to be the best predictor of performance, as people who test high in this trait are more productive, organize, less distractable, better at achieving their goals, have better health, succeed academically, are self-disciplined, hard-working and reliable. Tools to test emotional stability, assertiveness, and openness also help predict performance across domains needing creativeness and open mindedness (Hirsh, 2009).

The second category of tools discussed in this context are HRIS, or Human Resource Information Systems. Factors that enable HR staff