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.

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.

Supporting the chief role of “human resources” or human capital in enterprises and societies has been a recognized role of Human Resource socialist parties, that argue that value is first and foremost founded by their activity, and for that reason give explanation for a larger claim of incomes or relief from these enterprises or societies. Critics believe this is just a bargaining tactic which grew out of various practices of medieval European guilds into the modern trade unions and collective bargaining units.

The more traditional usage within corporations and  businesses refers to the individuals inside the firm, and to the segment of the firm’s organization that works with hiring, firing, training, and other personnel questions.

The purpose of Human Resources is to maximize the feedback on investment from the organization’s human resources and minimize financial risk. It is the accountability of human resource managers to manage these activities in an efficient, legal, fair, and consistent way.

Human resources is considered to be a term with which a lot of organizations describe the mixture of traditionally administrative personnel roles with performance management, employee relations and resource planning. The sphere draws upon concepts developed in Industrial and Organizational Psychology. Human resources have at least two related explanations depending on context. The original meaning derives from political economy and economics, where it was by tradition called labor, that is one of four factors of production.

Human resources management fulfills the following key functions:

1)                  Recruitment Strategy Planning;

2)                  Hiring Processes itself;

3)                  Selection of candidates;

4)                  Training and Development of personnel;

5)                  Evaluation and Management;

6)                  Process of Promotions;

7)                  Redundancy;

                  Managing Industrial and Employee Relations;

9)                  Record keeping of all personal data;

10)              Compensations, pensions, bonuses and so on in liaison with Payroll;

11)              Confidential advice to internal ‘customers’ dealing with problems at work;

12)              Process of career development.