STAFFING PRACTICES IN SMALL AND MEDIUM SCALE BUSINESSES.

CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background of the Study
Staffing is one of the most important functions of management. It is an aspect of human resource management that includes finding sufficient number of people who will take up employment in the business and selecting from this number those to whom employment will be offered. The staffing function is housed in the human resource or personnel department of most large organizations while in smaller organizations where there is often the absence of a well-defined separate personnel department, the process of staffing is conducted by the manager or owner of the business.
However, whether small, medium or large-scale enterprise the purpose of staffing is ensuring that positions within the organization are filled and remain filled with competent workers doing the work of the organization to ensure that goals are met. Most writers have agreed that staffing is composed of the following parts; recruitment, selection, placement, training and development, employee appraisal and separation. From this it can be concluded that staffing involves processes related to balancing the workload with available resources, recruiting, selecting among candidates for open positions, employees leaving the Organization, and transitioning into new positions (Carnegie Mellon University 001:109). Human resource is considered the most valuable yet the volatile and potentially unpredictable resource which an organization utilizes. If an organization fails to place and direct human resources in the right areas of the business, at the right time and at the right cost, serious inefficiencies are likely to arise creating considerable operational difficulties and likely business failure (Bramham 1990: Smith 1971). Acquiring and maintaining an adequate staff is the best asset an organization can have (Clifford: 1989:145).