Red herring in Human Resources

ON FRIDAY, March 26, the Irish Examiner Money and Jobs section had a piece on human resource management, suggesting that “companies unable to afford a human resource manager may be failing in their duty to follow proper procedures”.

The piece went on to suggest that human resource management (HRM) could be outsourced to a recruitment company. The inherent assumption is that HRM is the best way to manage people. This is something that has never been proved and something I've researched in much detail for my second satirical look at management, entitled HRM The Tower of Babble.

Recently FÁS published a large supplement in the national newspapers profiling companies that had been successful in its HRM initiative, the Excellence Through People (ETP) programme.