‘Whom you know’ strategy slammed

WHILE a few statutory organisations and institutions are working hard to improve the recruitment and selection criteria to meet the demands of contemporary organisational challenges, many have adopted “whom you know” strategy of recruitment.
Such recruitment do not raise productivity or add value to the organisation in the long run and eventually, the organisation becomes stagnant, corrupt and defunct or simply goes out of existence.
In such cases, the costs incurred have been met by the taxpayers. These were some of the issues the Mekere government attempted to address in its privatisation policies some years back.
For instance, Bank of South Pacific boasts of its improved services and a huge profit annually. This can be partly attributed to its new management which is committed to empowering its human resource department that pursues a strategic recruitment and selection drive to meet the demands of the market.
Instead of learning from such an experience, we continue to see people with very little appropriate knowledge occupying senior human resource positions in State agencies and institutions, and are hell bent in keeping their jobs, not through commitment and productivity but through domestication as Dr Unage stated in his article.
Domestication of public service positions pave for wantok system and rampant corruption. Most politicians who do not understand the importance of building a vibrant, dynamic and a shared culture of work in organisations, continue to contribute to the poor state of statutory organisations by politicising the recruitment and selection processes.
At an organisational level, for instance, Peter Loko at Telikom has to tell us that his HR department is well equipped to face the challenge forced on Telikom by Digicel in its recruitment and selection of staff.
At an institutional level, for instance, Unitech and the University of Goroka will have to do better in instilling confidence in the taxpayers.
The constant report of academics leaving Unitech and the recent jailing of the person in charge of IT at UOG (Oct 18) are serious issues directly related to the recruitment and selection practices in these institutions.

Bomai D Witne
Goroka