Informal Report

Word limit : 1000 words

TMA 02 Part I

Part I of TMA 02 requires you to read the following case study and apply your understanding of relevant HRM concepts from module Book 2 to the questions asked.

Army to pay civilian firm £1bn to recruit new soldiers

The Army is to pay a civilian firm £1 billion to recruit soldiers at the same time as it is making 20,000 troops redundant, The Daily Telegraph can disclose.

Next year civilians will take over Army recruiting at a cost of £14,000 per soldier headhunted, equivalent to the salary of the most junior rank.

The decision has been described as perverse by serving officers who have been forced to sack 1,000 soldiers already this year.

The Ministry of Defence has put out a tender for civilian human resources and recruitment companies to bid for the contract.

Under the Recruiting Partnering Project, the contractor will receive £1 billion over the next decade in order to recruit 7,500 officers and men every year.

Officials at Army Land Command in Wiltshire claim that the deal will save the Service £250 million overall over a decade by removing well­ paid senior NCOs and

officers from backroom work inputting data into computers.

But one senior officer said the plan was fraught with quite a few risks as the Army is axing 12,000 soldiers in the next three years followed by a further 8,000 in

2020.

I can see why people will see this as perverse when this amount is going into recruitment [at a time] when we are significantly reducing the Army, said Col Richard

Kemp, a former commander of British forces in Afghanistan.

He said the most effective recruiters were young soldiers who had served on operations.

It would be a big mistake if that was ignored, he said.

When civilians had been employed in recruiting in the past it has not been a great success, he added, although he admitted that the Army’s own recruitment programme

was not exactly a roaring success either.

About 17,000 recruits a year go through training but, on average, only 9,000 pass out as fully trained soldiers.

The MoD believes that civilians will help it improve the quality of recruits, reducing the wastage of those dropping out during training.

It will also release soldiers involved in administrative tasks for frontline duties. There are several hundred officers and men recruiting in offices across the

country.

The Army insists that uniformed soldiers will remain at the forefront of recruiting.

Despite the redundancies we still have to recruit, an Army source said.
We just need to make recruitment more effective. At the moment we are recruiting the people we can recruit rather than the ones we want to recruit.

It is understood that the RAF and Navy are making similar plans.

Air Commodore Andrew Lambert, of the UK National Defence Association, suggested that servicemen currently being made redundant would be taken on by the civilian firm

for less money.

I would also question whether this actually saves you money because, as with every other PFI, when the full costs are added up it doesn’t save you anything at all,

he said.

An Army spokesman said: The project is an initiative to both meet the numbers we need, reduce the fallout rate in training and improve retention.

The contract will modernise army recruiting and deliver savings in excess of £250 million over 10 years.

Source: Harding, T. (2011) Army to pay civilian firm £1bn to recruit new soldiers’ The Telegrapgh 11 October [Online]. Available at http://www.

telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/defence/8819327/Army-to-pay-civilian­ firm-1bn-to-recruit-new-soldiers.html (Accessed 1 September 2014).

TMA 02 Part I Question

Write an informal report of no more than 1,000 words which addresses the issues set out in Parts (a), (b) and (c). Please make sure you read the guidance notes on the

next page before attempting the report. You should read and follow the instructions below carefully. Each part of the process will carry marks for the assignment.

Question (a)

Considering the concept of recruitment as a two way process developed in Book 2, Session 3.2, highlight some main opportunities and dangers to be considered by the

Army in externalising the recruitment processes.
(30 marks)

Question (b)
Using ideas from Book 2, Session 3.3, introduce the concept of selection, outline the main methods of selecting employees and discuss their main advantages and

disadvantages for selecting soldiers.
(30 marks)

Question (c)
Using ideas from Book 2, Session 3.4, develop some recommendations for the Army for organising in an effective way the induction and socialisation processes of the

newly hired soldiers.
(30 marks)

3.3 Guidance notes for TMA 02 Part I
The case study is drawn from a real HRM situation. You are not required to carry out any further research on the case study in order to answer the questions. Instead

you are required to apply your learning from Book 2 to the case study and to demonstrate your understanding of the concepts and the reasons why HRM processes are

important. In answering the questions you are encouraged to make links between certain Sessions of Book 2.
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Question (a) requires you to consider the issue of recruitment. In particular, you are asked to explain why recruitment is a two way process: in order to answer this

point you will find it useful to refer to Session 3.2 in Book 2. You are then required to highlight some main opportunities and dangers to be considered by the Army in

externalising the recruitment processes. To do so you can refer to any concepts you find in Session 3 in Book 2 or you can draw some of your arguments from the article

if related to module concepts. Provide two main opportunities and two main dangers and explain why they are relevant. The discussion of recruitment as a two way

process will count for one third of the marks, one third for the description of opportunities of externalising the recruitment processes, and a third for the

description of the dangers of externalising the recruitment processes.

Question (b) requires you to think about the issue of selection. In particular, you are asked to highlight the main selection methods in HRM. You will find it useful

to refer to Session 3.3 in Book 2. In the first part of question (b) you are required to show your knowledge of module concepts about selection. In the second part you

are asked to discuss the main advantages and disadvantages of the different selection methods for selecting soldiers. In order to answer this part you are required to

critically apply module concepts to the case study reported in the article.

Question (c) requires you to think about the processes of induction and socialisation. In this part you can use the concepts developed in Session 3.4. In particular,

you are required to provide a definition of induction and socialisation, to describe some generic examples of induction and socialisation activities and then to apply

the concepts to the case study. For this last part, you are asked to make some proposals for organising the induction and socialisation process of the new hired

soldiers; in doing so you can draw both from the theoretical contents of Session 3.4 and from arguments reported in the article if related to module concepts.