Like other parts of life and business, human resources, or say HR, also has a unique life cycle. The HR life cycle is the sequence of the stages that employees go through and how they respond to their responsibilities. Every stage of the HR life cycle has its challenges, opportunities, and benefits.
What does the HR life cycle involve? How can an organization improve its approach to ensure employees have an excellent possible experience?
Below I am sharing the human resource life cycle stages that you need to pay attention to.
1. Attraction: The foremost step in the HR life cycle is to attract potential candidates to your workplace through excellent employer branding. Employer branding helps an organization to find, attract, and hire the perfect applicant for the organization. In today's era of 'Talent War,' a well-planned employer branding provides you a huge advantage that sets you apart from your competition.
Also Read: How to find the perfect candidate?
2. Recruitment: It is true that growing your business starts with hiring the right employee. Hiring decisions play a critical role in turnover, productivity, and growth. To succeed in the recruitment phase of the HR life cycle, professionals need a few strategies:
a). Creating strategic staffing planning includes understanding positions that need to be filled. A strategy that can help recruiters to screen out perfect candidates with the help of screening tools like a resume parser. It extracts resume/jobs data into their ATS/CRM quickly. This saves their time on data entry to do what they love, i.e., closing more jobs.
b). Introduce an interviewing protocol, which includes preparing the interview questionnaire. This guide provides HR professionals a framework to ask questions in sequence and decide which information to pursue in greater depth.
See the major stages of the Human Resource Life Cycle and what you can improve on those stages.
3. Onboarding: It is important to ensure that the new employees feel inspired by their new role, settle down easily with their team, and mix up quickly in companies' cultures. In short, new hires should feel welcomed and valued. The role of HR management at this stage is:
a). Convey the organization's brand and values.
b). Explain company culture
c). Align organizations’ expectations
4. Career Planning and Development: Career development opportunities are important to keep the employees engaged. After the employees establish themselves in the organization and determine long-term career objectives, the HR professionals must try to help them to meet their goals. This can include training and development programs to prepare employees for more responsible positions. These programs will also help HR professionals to identify their employees' potential, skills, and interests. HR professionals can use this information when looking for ways to help employees to grow.
5. Retention: This stage of the HR life cycle gives HR professionals an opportunity to re-energize the employees. Show appreciation to employees by offering unique benefits such as flexible working hours, extra paid time off, etc. We know there is a lot of time and money invested when hiring someone. Losing a skilled employee means that the entire process must start again. Organizations must create a culture where every employee feels confident.
Like any other cycle, the HR cycle also comes to an end either by retirement or leaving the organization for more pay and benefits. The motive of all the stages of the HR life cycle is to hire a perfect employee and streamline the process to run effectively. HR professionals need to invest their time in the HR life cycle to have remarkable results.