Carmine

May I recommend a book to you if you are serious about entering the field of Human Resource Management:

"Human Resource Champions - The Next Agenda for Adding Value and Delivering Results" by Dave Ulrich and published by Harvard Business School.

Why do I suggest this book? Well we hear a lot about organizational capital these days and yet, if the HR department is extremely good they should be able to help create the people needed to increase the formation and attainment of this elusive and highly productive organizational capital. Although this book was written in 1997, it should be noted that many of its primary themes are alive and well today.

Each time a person is hired, the human resource person must not only consider the proper hiring procedures, but also how each person hired adds value to the stockholder, increases the productivity of the corporation, assist in streamlining cooperation and will enhance the customers experience or the vendor relationships.

Human Resource Departments should be measured in terms of productivity and by the successes of the people they hire for the company. There are ways to manage and track employee contributions to the company and they should be tracked. The HR department should align its strategies with the companies business plan, not just the company's mission statement.

Large companies with many special teams working on special products must often wonder how they can get the people they need to complete the projects. Often large companies have the talent from within, and do not even realize it, other times the centralized HR department cannot work directly with them to get the talent or does not understand what they are looking for. This is one issue that the book brought up in a case study that is of interest.

The Book is jammed pack with great ideas and concepts to turn the HR department into a super strategic partner of the organization. Now in saying all this, I am not 100% sold on all the ideas and generally have a strong distaste for any such book coming out of Harvard, but still recommend it.

L. Winslow is an Economic Advisor to the Online Think Tank, a Futurist and retired entrepreneur http://www.worldthinktank.net . Currently he is planning a bicycle ride across the US to raise money for charity and is sponsored by http://www.Calling-Plans.com and all the proceeds will go to various charities who sign up.