ASKARI COMMERCIAL BANK LIMITED HUMAN RESOURCE PRACTICES FOCUS ON SELECTION & RECRUITMENT

Abstract

Economies and businesses, all over the world, are facing new trends of globalization and the free market economy. These trends have produced a compelling and comparative environment for Pakistan’s public and private sector economies as well as for organizations. The biggest challenges for the organizations are to meet the stakeholders need to remain competitive. The organizations are competing not only for the organizational resources but for the human resources as well, they strive to attract the skilled labor, which could ensure the high quality of product, and services thus become in a better position to satisfy the customer needs. The traditional bureaucratic systems are replaced by more decentralized setups where employees are given authority to respond quickly to the problems as they emerged in the work place. My personal observation is that the HR Departments in our organizations are still suffering from “boss-subordinate” and “senior-junior” psyche that is detrimental to growth and expansion. Pakistan’s economy needs quick responses to the new emerging global challenges and speed up its pace of economic and business activities. The job of any HR Department in an organization is to ensure that it has the right amount and right kind of people to deliver a particular level of output or services in future. This is done through Human Resource Planning; attain long-range revenue goals and plans of an organization applying different types of strategies. These goals are achieved by assessing the current situation of existing employees inventory positions, vacant/open positions and forecasting of human resources need (types of employees nature and types of positions). Human Resource Management is one key area that can help an organizations achieve its goals and meet global challenges. The concept of HRM was in its Askari Commercial Bank Limited 4 formative phase in Pakistan in the early eighties. With the advent of Multinational Companies, the national businesses had no choice but to introduce the concept of HRM. This process of adoption attained more attention in the nineties. Now businesses, small and large, seem inclined to introduce the HRM to manage their work force efficiently. ACBL is one of the relatively new but rapidly growing commercial Bank in Pakistan. Like all modern business organizations, this Bank attaches immense importance to its HR function. The HR Department of the Bank is a professionally managed segment staffed by 25 functionaries. The immense value attached by the Bank to its employees is reflected by its stated set of values, according to which the Bank considers its employees as most valuable assets. The HR policy of the Bank focuses on multi-talent hiring, professional grooming, requisite training and meritocracy based reward system. The Bank also claims to lay great emphasis on nurturing a distinct culture, cohesive teamwork, and training and realistic performance management In the research paper, the two Human Resource practices, “Recruitment and Selection” have been explained in detail. The comparison between the practices of the few multinational organizations and high quality Banks tells that there are large variations in such practices of certain organizations and Banks. Therefore, the study describes the recruitment and selection methods along with the recommendations for further improving such practices in Askari Commercial Bank Limited to attract the best people from the market and develop long-term employee relationship. In today’s competitive environment when employees have all the avenues of advancement open to them the success of the Bank or any organization is to attract the best talent and then retain it. Retention is cheaper than attracting the new and developing it to the required culture. Askari Commercial Bank Limited