Human Resources Management
Assignment 1

A glimpse of Manulife Financial
In 1887, a Canadian leading financial services group was born. Manulife Financial currently has primary operations across Asia, Canada and the United States. This year, Manulife Financial celebrates its 125th year of serving clients with sturdy, dependable, consistent and advanced solutions for their most important financial decisions. Manulife Financial’s international operations offer financial protection and wealth management product and services which include life insurance, long-term care services, pension products, annuities, mutual funds, banking products and property and casualty retrocession insurance.
Manulife Financial operates under the brand name “John Hancock” in the US and “Manulife Financial” in Canada and Asia (The Manufacturers Life Insurance Company 2012).

TASK 1
(1.1)
The concept of Human resource Management has been shifted since the day of its discovery long time ago. The ‘current’ human resource management was not the same as how it was –similar –but not identical. The ‘older’ human resource management is often perceived as the traditional way of human resources management and called as ‘personnel management’ nowadays. In the contrary, the human resources management we all use today is usually referred as the modern way of managing human resources (Nayab N 2010).
Gaining a competitive advantage is and has been one of the things companies always seek. Competitive advantage is “an advantage over competitors gained by offering consumers greater value, either by means of lower prices or by providing greater benefits and service that justifies higher prices” (Tutor2u.net 2012). Decades ago, businesses tend to choose to use the product itself to gain competitive advantage. That is why businesses at that time prefer to use a type of human resource management called as