To know the business environment where any organization operates, three chief trends should be considered:Demographics – the characteristics of a population and workforce, for instance, age, gender or social class. This type of trend may have influence in relation to pension offerings, insurance packages etc.Diversity – the difference within the population and workplace. Changes in society now mean that a bigger proportion of organizations are made up of “baby-boomers” or older employees to compare to thirty years ago.

In terms of recruitment and selection it is significant to consider carrying out a thorough job analysis to estimate the level of skills/technical abilities, competencies, flexibility of the employee required and so on. At this point it is significant to consider both the internal and external factors that can have influence on the recruitment of employees. The external factors are those out-with the powers of the company and include issues such as current and future trends of the labor market such as skills, education level, government investment into industries and so on. On the other hand internal influences are simpler to control, predict and monitor, for instance management styles.

As a general rule the abstractions of macro-economics are concerned with human resources this way - as it characterizes no mechanisms to represent alternative or ingenuity.

For this reason one interpretation is that “firm-specific human capital” as described in macro-economics is the modern and proper definition of “human resources” - and that this is insufficient to represent the contributions of “human resources” in any modern concept of political economy.

The established but extremely limited context of hiring, firing, and job description is considered a 20^th century anachronism. Most corporate companies that compete in the modern global economy have accepted a view of human capital that mirrors the modern agreement as above. Some of these, in sequence, deprecate the term “human resources” as ineffective.

As the term refers to obvious exploitations of human capital in one context or another, it can still be considered to apply to manual labor, mass agriculture, low skill “Mc Jobs” in service industries, military and other jobs that have clear job descriptions, and that generally do not encourage creative or social abilities.

In the very limited context of corporate “human resources”, there is a complementary pull to reflect and require workplace diversity which echoes the diversity of a total customer base. Foreign language and culture abilities, ingenuity, humor, and careful listening, are instance of traits that such programs normally require. It would emerge that these evidence a general shift to the human capital position, and an acknowledgment that human beings do be a part of a cause much more to a productive enterprise than “work”: they bring their temperament, their ethics, their creativity, their social relations, and in some cases even their pets and kids, and alter the character of a workplace. The words corporate culture itself is used to describe such processes.

Over time the United Nations have come to more usually support the developing countries’ standpoint, and have requested important offsetting “foreign aid” contributions so that a developing country losing human capital does not lose the ability to continue to train new people in trades, businesses, and the arts.

In a chain of reports of the UN Secretary-General to the General Assembly over the past decade, a wide inter sectoral method to developing human resourcefulness has been outlined as a main concern for socio-economic development and predominantly anti-poverty strategies. This needs strategic and integrated public policies, for instance in education, health, and employment sectors that encourage occupational skills, and performance enhancement.

An extreme type of this view is that historical inequities such as African slavery must be compensated by existing developed nations, that benefited from stolen “human resources” as they were on the increase. This is an particularly controversial view, but it echoes the common theme of converting human capital to “human resources” and thus significantly diminishing its value to the host society, for example “Africa”, as it is put to narrow down imitative use as “labor” in the using society.

Nowadays analysis point out that human beings are not “commodities” or just “resources”, but are creative and social people that make class contributions further than ‘labor’ to a society and to civilization. The wide term human capital has progressed to enclose some of this complexity, and in micro-economics the term “firm-specific human capital” has come to stand for a meaning of the term “human resources.”

The discuss about “human resources” versus human capital thus in a number of ways echoes the debate concerning natural resources versus natural capital.

A significant controversy regarding labor mobility demonstrates the broader philosophical issue with usage of the words “human resources”: governments of developing countries often regard developed countries that encourage immigration or “guest workers” as appropriating human resources that is rightfully part of the developing country and required to further its growth as a civilization. They dispute that this appropriation is comparably to colonial commodity fiat wherein a colonizing European authority would define an arbitrary price for natural resources, extracting which diminished country natural capital.

As a general rule, heavily unionized nations such as France and Germany have adopted and encouraged job descriptions only particularly within certain trade unions. One view of this trend is that a solid social consensus on political economy and a good social welfare system facilitates labor mobility and tries to make the entire economy more effective, as labor can move from one enterprise to another with little disagreement or difficulty in adapting.