Competencies Sought After in HR Jobs: A Content Analytic Perspective

The concept of branding has been widely addressed to in the marketing literature.However, most organizations concentrate majorly on building a positive image of their market offering in the minds of the customers. Recently, organizations are shifting towards a concept of stakeholder focus from a total concentration on customers. Stakeholders can take many forms, ranging from employees, to shareholders, to customers and etc. Since employees are also considered to be a stakeholder in the organization, effective communication to both the potential and existing employees becomes important for the organization to accomplish its goals.Organizations make use of various routes to communicate its positive characteristics to the various stakeholders, one of which is specific to internal and potential employees. This phenomenon is popularly known as “employment branding”. Employment branding can be done for both retaining the existing talent and also to attract new talent. Employment branding is a tool for attracting new talent and one way of achieving it is through job advertisements. The main purpose of the job advertisements is to attract the required talent by mentioning the competency requirements. This implies that job advertisements could be a good source of looking at the competencies required for various positions vacant in organizations. The purpose of the present study is to examine the competencies that are sought by the organizations for HR positions in India. The study also tries to identify the changes (if any) that have taken place in the requirements of the competencies over a two time periods. One hundred seventy four HRM job advertisements from The Times of India throughout the year 2004 and 2008 were coded into a database using content analysis. The results were then compared to the list of competencies given by the American Society of Training and Development in the year 1987. It was found that most of the competencies given by the McLagan and Suhadolnik (1989) were not prevalent in the Indian context, and about 65% of job advertisements in the year 2004 mentioned technical competencies and 44% of the job advertisements selected in the year 2008 also predominantly mentioned the required technical competencies. Other competencies like the interpersonal competencies, personal competencies were very scarcely mentioned in the job advertisements for various HR positions. The exploratory study is aimed to throw light of the current HR recruitment practices and has elements of interest both for academia and industry.