Strategic Resourcing

Strategic resourcing is a leading topic of strategic human resource management. It is identified that human resources should be associated with organizations' strategic planning and its overall business goals. In other words, Ensuring total utilization of human resources, where the strategic and operational requirement of the organization are matching with human resources. This involves maintaining the quality number of employees, selecting and promoting people who perfectly fit the organizational culture and match the strategic requirements of the organization. 

Strategic resourcing is essentially about the integration of business and employee resourcing strategies so that the latter contribute to the achievement of the former (Armstrong, 2014). An organization is ensuring that it achieves competitive advantage by recruiting, developing and retaining more people with relevant capabilities than its competitors. And this considered as the main objective of strategic resourcing. 

Developing a positive psychological contract helps an organization to attract people with more capabilities to achieve its goals through strategic resourcing. Retaining such employees by providing them better opportunities, rewards and conditions of employment than the rivals will increase their engagement and commitment and create mutual trust (Armstrong, 2014).

How strategic HRM influence resourcing

Since, it is 'People' who implement the strategic plan, that is where the strategic HRM approaches resourcing. 

According to Miles and Snow, (1978) following factors will be strongly influenced by the type of business strategies adopted by the organization.

• The numbers of people required to meet business needs.
• The skills and behavior required to support the achievement of business strategies.
• The impact of organizational restructuring as a result of rationalization, decentralization, delayering, acquisitions, mergers, product or market development or the introduction of new technology.
• Plans for changing the culture of the organization in such areas as ability to deliver, performance standards, quality, customer service, team working and flexibility which indicates the need for people with different attitudes, beliefs and personal characteristics.      

Strategic HRM places more emphasis on finding people with attitudes and behavior which are likely to fit what management expects to be appropriate and conducive to success.  The resourcing strategies that emerge from the strategic resourcing exist to provide the people and skills required to support the business strategy, but they should also contribute to the formulation of that strategy (Armstrong, 2014).

The components of strategic employee resourcing

Strategic resourcing includes specific strategies for;

• Workforce planning - A strategy to foresight the need of people and utilizing their skills to acquire the desired results.

•  Developing the organization's employee value proposition and its employer brand - Praising the employees in many ways which would help to persuade them to join or remain with the organization; Employer brand is the image presented by an organization as a good employer.

• Resourcing plans - This includes preparing plans for finding people from within the organization and/or for learning and development programs to help people learn new skills.

• Retention plans - This is to ensure that the people with right set of skills, knowledge, competencies, qualifications and expertise that the organization needs will choose to stay in the organization. 

• Flexibility plans - Increasing flexibility in the use of human resources to cope up with any changing circumstances.

• Talent management - This makes sure that the organization has the talented people to meet present and future business needs. It also involves succession planning.

Strategic resourcing gives an edge to the organization from others. “In a rapidly changing competitive environment, human resources are one important source of competitive advantage. Human resource systems can contribute to sustained competitive advantage through facilitating the development of competencies that are firm specific" (Caliskan, 2010).

Reference

Armstrong, M. (2014). Armstrong's Handbook Of Human Resource Management Practice. 13th edn.

Caliskan, E. N. (2010). Journal of Naval Science and Engineering . The Impact Of Strategic Human Resource Management On Organizational Performance, 6 No.2 , 100-116. 

Miles, R. E. and Snow, C. C. (1978). Organizational Strategy: Structure and process, New York, McGraw-Hill