The importance of the Human Resource Department by Ng Hui Chen, GSM
Employee is one of the most important assets of a company as they have significant influential power to the success of a company. Therefore, effective and efficient human resource management is crucial to every organization. However, the emergence of the centralized Human Resource Department (HRD) has created conflicts on whether the responsibility of human resource management should lie on line managers or HRD. The debate about the roles of line managers and centralized HRD in human resource management has been ongoing since couple of years ago (Hutchinson and Purcell, 2003). In my opinion, HRD remains as one of the important role within an organization despite the need for all line managers to adopt certain functions of human resources. Human resources management functions the best when the line managers and centralized HRD work hand in hands. The rationale of this idea will be discussed in the later part of this article.

First of all, we should take a look of the core functions of human resource management irrespective of whether it is the responsibility of HRD or line managers. Generally, human resource management can be classified into three main functions:

i) Recruiting
In this stage, the major task is to recruit and select the best talents with necessary knowledge and skills to assist the company to achieve its goals. HR practitioner should perform thorough job analysis in order to gain deeper understanding of the requirement of the job.

ii) Developing
After recruiting the staff, HR practitioner is responsible to train and groom the staff for the job via various types of training programs. Then, HR should ensure that the performance of the staff is in line with the organization’s objectives. If the performance of the staff deviates expected standards, HR practitioner should