Emphasis on Leadership Competencies and Professional Ethics for Human Resource Professionals: Analysing the Recruitment Advertisements

Abstract

Human Resource (HR) as a functional domain is largely concerned with managing the human capital of an organisation, and it aims to achieve maximum output by realising the full potential of workforce. This article attempts to analyse the emphasis put by organisations on three important competencies, namely, leadership traits, social intelligence and ethics. The extent of emphasis put on these three competencies was determined through a qualitative analysis of around 450 job advertisements (job ads) posted by organisations for the purpose of recruiting HR managers at various levels in their organisations. The results obtained after manual coding and analysis of these job advertisements suggest that although traits of leadership, social intelligence and ethics are important competencies for HR professionals, organisations put weak emphasis on communicating this at the time of recruitment. If we compare among leadership, social intelligence and ethics, Leadership is the most emphasised upon at the time of recruitment for HR managers. Overall, it was found that, organisations neither communicated their ethics and values as part of their job advertisements and nor put specific insistence for these qualities in candidates applying for the HR positions therein. At this point, it is difficult to say whether or not these competencies are assessed by interviewers before finally selecting them, and the resultant validity and reliability of the process is questionable.