Staffing Alaska

The traditional method of measuring whether the HR departments were doing their job correctly was to look at how long it took to fill a vacant position, and how many positions were open at any given time. It was assumed that as long as open positions were filled within a reasonable amount of time, the staff of the Human Resources department was doing their job well. At some companies in Alaska, there were even bonuses offered for HR departments which managed to consistently fill positions rapidly. Unfortunately for the companies that believed these bonuses were an incentive for a job well done, all of these practices led to HR departments hiring candidates to fill open positions that were essentially “seat fillers”. While these people may have been good candidates, they were not necessarily the best people for the positions they were filling, leaving them frustrated with their jobs and the hiring companies in Alaska with ineffective employees filling out their ranks. Eventually, it became obvious that filling a position quickly was not a goal that truly reflected the tasks of the HR department.

A main focus of staffing metrics is taking information that has always been available for HR departments to analyze and quantifying it, turning it into hard numbers or dollars or percentages. The importance of having actual numbers available for HR departments to compare and contrast cannot be overstated. Qualitative data tends to be less concrete, less certain, and it is difficult to determine with simple qualitative data where the best course of action lies. When an HR manager can say definitively to the company’s upper management that it will cost twenty thousand dollars more to fill a vacant position with an unqualified hire than it would cost to simply leave the position vacant until a better candidate is found, it becomes very simple to determine which course of action should be followed. This is not to say that qualitative data is useless in a modern business setting, simply that it becomes far more useful when there are hard numbers available to back up the guesses and assumptions that qualitative data can tend to rely on. Changes in staffing metrics have made a big difference in the ability of HR departments to confidently analyze the performance of various departments in the company both over time and as compared to other departments within the same company in Alaska.

With companies today growing exponentially and increasing the number of skilled positions that are vital to the company’s functioning, employees who are in a position simply to fill a vacant spot can cost Alaska companies millions of dollars and greatly affect their ability to do business in an expanding global market. It is important to understand that these employees are not necessarily under qualified or substandard employees, simply that they are people who have not been placed in a position that uses their strengths, to the detriment of both the filler employee and the hiring company in Alaska. Staffing metrics allow HR departments to determine where it is disadvantageous for a company to employ a candidate who is not fully qualified for the position, and where it truly is vital to have the position filled regardless of the abilities of the person filling it.