By S Zangairai

People are the greatest assets on which competitive advantage is built, whether in the public or private sector. In the words people have become inimitable assets, meaning that their skills cannot be imitated by competitors. Talented employees or high caliber employees are the most valuable asset of any organization. Finding the right people and putting them at right jobs is the most important challenge for any organization, and the government is not spared either. This is supported by the concept of Human Resource planning which entails that the human resource requirement is forecasted. It involves functions like, recruitment, selection, induction etc. That being said, the main thrust of this article is to discuss the challenges being faced by Zimbabwean government in recruiting and retaining talented employees. Practical examples of government ministries and departments shall be provided as a way of bringing a clear picture of the ensuing challenges. A theoretical and conceptual framework of the challenges shall be provided in the discussion especially the PESTILE challenges which have proved to be the major ones. The discussion shall be guided by the processes of recruitment through the systems approach.

I feel that I would not have done justice to my presentation if I don’t define these key words, recruitment and retention. I define recruitment as the process of searching prospective employees and stimulating them to apply for jobs in the organization. Its aim is to increase the number of applicants and the unsuitable ones are automatically eliminated in the selection process. Though the function of recruitment seems to be easy, a number of factors make performance of recruitment a complex one.  Some of the recruitment objectives include; to attract people with multi-dimensional skills and experiences that suits the present and future organizational strategies, to infuse fresh blood at all levels of the organization, to develop an organizational culture that attracts competent people to the company and to search or head hunt people whose skills fit the company’s values. Retention, simply put, is the ability of an organisation to retain its employees, or keeping staff in which the organisation has invested.

Challenges of recruiting and retaining talented employees in the Public Sector

The challenges of attracting and retaining talented manpower exists in all sectors of business activity, be it consultancy, manufacturing or the service sector, with each sector developing its own perspectives based on its experiences. A sharing experience from the companies in the engineering, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, consumer goods, consultancy and information technology sectors revealed that though the challenges of attracting and retaining talent in such a range of companies differed in the intensity and type, a common thread seemed to link the divergent spectrum. The impact of the attraction/retention strategies could be presented in the form of eight vertices i.e., work culture, job/career, team, compensation, titles, golden handcuffs, individual, values etc. There is no mantra to retain the talent. It is important to capture the knowledge and talent in the organization by having the systems of documenting. The organization must have to leverage the urge of employees to learn as a powerful retention tool.

The critical role of talented employees in government includes leveraging of knowledge for attaining objectives of productivity and competitiveness of a national economy through social capital competitiveness, leveraging knowledge for improving internal processes, formulation of sound government policies and programs and efficient public service delivery for increased productivity. Hiring talented individuals is critical to an organization’s success. But in order to hire the most talented, they must first be recruited. Recruiting employees can be a challenging task, so recruiters have to make important decisions, including whom to target, what message to convey and how to staff recruitment efforts. If not done correctly, an organization’s recruitment efforts can produce job applicants who are unqualified, who lack diversity or who may decline job offers. These same applicants may be prone to turnover if hired. A poorly designed recruitment process can miss attractive job candidates, including those who work for competitors.

Challenges being faced by the Zimbabwean government range from manmade to natural and this have resulted in the government failing to attract the required skills hence compromising the quality of service in all government institutions. According to Ncube and Maunganidze (2014), ‘militarization of parastatals and public enterprises as well as local authorities is one of the challenges that has contributed to failure of attracting talented people in the government leading to the creation of a culture of patronage, corruption and looting. As a result of this, it seems most organisations are headed by incompetent, unqualified and inexperienced staff. (ZBC, Air Zimbabwe, NSSA, NRZ, local authorities, GMB; just to mention a few). Qualified and talented employees without a military background therefore are neglected hence affecting the performance of the departments. If government was not ‘militarising’ positions, it could have  been attracting talented employees such as those heading companies like Econet, Mimosa, Barclays bank, Stanchart, etc, which are led by talented, competent and qualified employees.

Another challenge faced by the government is liquidity crunch bedeviling the economy. The true facts are that the government is financially crippled to attract the best talent on the market. Zimbabwe experienced an economic downturn over the past decades, which impacted negatively on the wellbeing of the population.  The economic downturn therefore meant less revenue generation and decreased funding for most government programs. The escalating economic challenges peaked from year 2008 resulting in huge staff turnover and brain drain of specialists in the government service. In order to rehabilitate the country from the economic downturn, an inclusive government was formed in 2009.  One of its immediate tasks was “Getting Zimbabwe Moving Again”. Within a few weeks, the new Government launched the Short-Term Emergency and Recovery Programme (STERP) as a strategy for rehabilitating the country. However all these measures have failed to market the government’s working environment since it failed to attract the required talented employees.

To be continued next week!