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Research Proposal

Human Resource Management (University of the Punjab)

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 Research Proposal

(An Evaluative study of Recruitment in Post COVID-19; Analysis of recruitment

strategies for SMEs in Pakistan)

Session: (2019-21)

Human Resource Management

Submitted By:

Umar Saeed MHRM-IAS-27-R-F19

Saira MHRM-IAS-48-R-F19

Inam Ullah Khan MHRM-IAS-108-R-F19

Maqsood Ali MHRM-IAS-107-R-F19

Javeria Aslam MHRM-IAS-31-R-F19

Submitted To: Mr. Mubeen Khalid

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 Institute of Administrative Sciences

University of the Punjab Lahore

Table of Contents

List of Acronyms.......................................................................................................................... 3

Introduction.................................................................................................................................. 4

Literature Review......................................................................................................................... 5

Social recruitment sites:........................................................................................................... 7

BLOG.................................................................................................................................................8

Google..................................................................................................................................... 8

Post on niche job sites............................................................................................................. 8

University Recruitment will move online...................................................................................9

Vision 2030 Document............................................................................................................. 9

Research problem..................................................................................................................... 10

Research Paradigm................................................................................................................... 11

Research Objectives..................................................................................................................11

Research Questions and hypothesis.........................................................................................11

Significance of Research...........................................................................................................12

Research Methodology.............................................................................................................. 12

Research Design....................................................................................................................... 12

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Data collection instruments........................................................................................................13

Questionnaires....................................................................................................................... 13

Interviews............................................................................................................................... 14

Validity and reliability.................................................................................................................14

Validity................................................................................................................................... 14

Reliability................................................................................................................................ 15

Ethical constraints and issues:...................................................................................................15

Data Analysis............................................................................................................................. 15

Quantitative Data................................................................................................................... 16

Qualitative Data...................................................................................................................... 16

Data findings, interpretations:....................................................................................................17

Conclusion................................................................................................................................. 18

References................................................................................................................................ 19

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List of Acronyms

HRM Human resource management

SMEs Small and medium sized enterprises

SMEDA Small and medium enterprises

development authority

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Introduction

The outbreak of coronavirus disease-20191 (COVID-19) has severely affected national and

global economies. Various enterprises are facing different issues with a certain degree of losses.

Particularly, enterprises are facing a variety of problems such as a decrease in demand, supply

chain disruptions, cancelation of export orders, raw material shortage, and transportation

disruptions, among others. Nevertheless, it is quite clear that enterprises around the globe are

experiencing the significant impact of COVID-19 outbreak on their businesses. We argue that

major victims of COVID-19 outbreak are the small & medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) because

SMEs, in comparison to large enterprises, usually do not possess sufficient resources, especially

financial and managerial, and are not prepared for such disruptions likely to go longer than

expected (Bartik et al., 2020; Prasad et al., 2015).

SMEs have to take various steps for cost cutting including downsizing due to this pandemic.

Now when the pandemic is almost under control and businesses are reopening, SMEs will have

to recruit new employees to run their businesses smoothly. As SMEs or small businesses and can

not afford high recruiting cost and that’s why they need revised recruiting strategies to recruit

best talent so that they can survive and remain competitive in the market. So it is

This topic has been chosen due to the large number of SMEs and their contribution towards the

economy of Pakistan in these turbulent business environments. As SMEs cannot afford higher

recruitment costs so they generally look for employees with multiple skills. If the proposed

recruitment strategies imposed successfully so they can play an important role for the survival of

SMEs in Pakistan.

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Literature Review

SMEs sector is back bone of Pakistan economy. The SMEs is sectors in Pakistan play a vital role

in economy and considered as a survival in worse economical condition. (Kamran Sherazi 2013).

Dynamic and flexible SMEs are playing their part in reducing unemployment levels,

earning foreign exchange, upgrading the knowledge profile of the work force, improving the

business management skills, and diffusing technological learning all over Pakistan. In addition,

SMEs are constructively and productively mobilizing the domestic resources and generate

employment opportunities otherwise has unemployment. Hence, the new era challenges are the

competitive strengths of the SMEs sector (Hafeez, 2014).

COVID-19 pandemic has sparked long term changes in the recruitment process to every business

corporation who are intensely involved in recruiting potential candidates from different sources

as of now, organisations old strategy will not work and there is a need to form or reinvent new

recruitment strategies. (Ms.Arpita ptel ,2020).

Rate of failure of SMEs firms development is higher in developing countries. It is clear

that despite previous efforts, the SMEs sector hasn’t received due priority and not achieved

well targeted result (Kamran Sherazi 2013).

SMEs usually always rely on supply chain network to operate. Closure of suppliers premises and

operations, and pending of international trade for raw materials and suppliers due to the

lockdown in most of the major exporters countries as China was immediately affecting the SMEs

operation. Also emphasised that their ability to redesign their business direction within a very

short period is quite limited (Geograpia 2020). Compared with large companies, SME can be

more flexible in achieving business transformation. They can recognise their HR structure and

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start recruiting talents more quickly to prepare themselves for potential changes. SME should

develop medium and long-term Human Resources planning strategies to prepare well for new

challenges in the post COVID-19 era (By Ellen Yin; 2020).

In Malaysia, recent study by Azmi et al. (2020) on 348 small and medium enterprises highlights

the role of staffs, managerial expertise and financial strength on SMEs resistance during the

economic downturn. Empirical investigation by Nur et al. (2014) on the predictors of financially

distress amongst 278 SMEs found almost similar evidence whereby the liquidity, cash flow, firm

size, location, business sector and legal form of the enterprises are the predictors of firms’

difficulties. Interestingly, the study reveals that Malaysian SMEs relies heavily on long-term and

short-term debts to support their total assets and operation. Thus, the debts will give more

pressure to the firms during the turmoil period. (Mohd Abdullah jusoh, 2020)

Svatošová (2017) highlights the importance of crisis, remediation and rescue strategies for SMEs

during business turmoil period. The necessary strategies minimise the bankruptcy risk, and bad

financial impacts (liquidity, profitability, leverage, etc.). The rescue strategy covers the business

conception, production, and searching for new opportunities. Other related remediation strategy

relates to “debt forgiveness” and renegotiation strategy with financial institution and debtors as

managers concern about firm’s cash flow imbalance (Wahyudi, 2014). In case of default risk

study among 2,172 SMEs in Indonesia, cash flow problems are identified as the major cause of

small firms’ liquidity and bankruptcy risk as compared to the larger firms.

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Pakistan has to form vital strategic choices to ensure superior growth in the manufacturing sector

in a rapidly changing and international competitive environment. It is acknowledged that variety

of competencies and capabilities are important to counter the rapid changes in the business

environment. The key ingredients such as better managerial practices, competencies, innovation

and technological levels are needed to make SMEs competitive. SMEs Business networking and

trust will be enhanced through better relationship among entrepreneurs. Potential benefits are

derived from business network and will further help to grow the SME sector. ( mohd sobri

minai;2018)

Social recruitment sites:

The COVID-19 crisis means that there is no better time for recruiters and businesses to engage

with audiences on social media platforms. It’s the ideal time to utilise these digital platforms and

to integrate them into your recruitment strategy as it’s likely that now we’ve seen the impact

social media can have, it will revolutionise recruitment and marketing after the coronavirus

pandemic has passed. Recruitment through social sites will cost less money and recruitment

process can be done efficiently and effectively in small period of time. (Suraiya ishak, 2002)

When will the pandemic ends? Sadly, No one knows this answer. Unemployment rate will

continuously increase with this pandemic. As we know there is a chance of spreading virus while

face to face meeting so in this scenario social media recruitment strategy is better. It will help to

continue the business and decrease unemployment rate as well.

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BLOG:

This is important because the existing eBusiness literature tends to treat eBusiness collectively

rather than focusing on the specific business uses of different eBusiness technologies, and to treat

SMEs as a homogeneous group.

Blogs consist of regular entries of commentary and descriptions of events (blogging). The

content of a micro blog is simply smaller in size (Dm Arvind Malik 2020)

Google:

An American multinational corporation specialising in Internet-related services; most famously

its core search engine, but also a large chain of products including Google+, largest social

networking site in the world.

Note- Google +, Due to low user engagement and disclosed software design flaws that

potentially allowed outside developer’s access to personal information of its users, the Google+

developer API was discontinued on March 7, 2019, and Google+ was shut down for business

and personal use on April 2, 2019

Post on niche job sites

It’s easy to post open position on LinkedIn, monsters or indeed, but your small buisness listing

may get lost in the sea of openings. It’s not easy to stand out on particular job sites when you’re a

small business, so it may be worth posting job opening on niche job sites.

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LinkedIn had more than 187 million members in over 200 countries and territories. 63% of

LinkedIn members are located outside of US new members sign up to LinkedIn every second.

University Recruitment will move online

One of the most fundamental areas that is rapidly changing is university recruitment. Some of

these changes were evident even before the pandemic, such as digital portfolios social media

advertisement and phone calls. They replaced the traditional methods to ease the tedious

university recruitment process. In a post COVID-19 world students will experience University

recruitment in a different light.

On boarding is another area of recruitment which has now gone virtual. Mike Pritchett, CEO of

cloud video tech firm shootsta, told people matters he is Seeing more enterprises looking for

ways to communicate across their organisations in the absence of face-to-face meetings. There is

a real risk that reduced engagement and communications between employees will dramatically

impact the company performance.

Therefore, the findings indicate that, Situation in this pandemic (COVID-19) demands of new

acceptable strategies of recruitment for SMEs, not in Pakistan but all over the world. Use of

social media will be beneficial.

Vision 2030 Document:

Vision 2030 document includes that Pakistan will overcome the poor performance of past.

The fundamental and core Point of view 2030 is the establishment of the society Which is

productive as well as innovative, this is the main way to be competitive in the 21st-century. It is

stated that demand base skills is a major thrust of the Vision 2030. The aims of the

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“Government of Pakistan Planning Commission Vision (2030)” regarding manufacturing and

SMEs sector to combat the poor performance are following:

1. Pakistan has to form vital strategic choices to ensure superior growth in the

manufacturing sector in a rapidly changing and international competitive environment. It

is acknowledged that variety of competencies and capabilities are important to counter

the rapid changes in the business environment.

2. Due to increase in competitiveness of the international arena, Pakistan will need to

make the accumulation of knowledge and focus on entrepreneurial education that is the

major driver of its economic growth.

3. The key ingredients such as better managerial practices, competencies, innovation and

technological levels are needed to make SMEs competitive.

4. SMEs Business networking and trust will be enhanced through better relationship

among entrepreneurs. Potential benefits are derived from business network and will

further help to grow the SME sector.

5. For the excellence of business, the skilled and innovative technical personnel consider as

driving force for the betterment of the economy (saqlain Raza ;2018)

Research problem

According to the Pakistan labour force survey (2017 to 18) the unemployment rate in the country

is 5.8% (SohaisP 2018). However due to the ongoing crises and lockdown the unemployment

rate is expected to reach 8.1% during the fiscal year 2020-21 (siddiqui 2020). As expected, the

COVID-19 outbreak has significant impact on SMEs operating in Pakistan. Over a year 94.57%

of the enterprises under study indicated that their business has been affected in some form by the

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ongoing coronavirus outbreak or due to lockdown while 3.26% expressed No impact and 2.17%

of enterprises were unsure that about the impact (Moshis Shafi 2020). (Research in globalization

2(2020)

(100018)

Research Paradigm

We are using the paradigm of positivism because of the scientific nature of our research. As

scientific research pursues a step by step, logical, organized, and rigorous method to find a

solution to a problem.

Research Objectives

The Main objective to conduct this research is to analyse different recruitment strategies for

SMEs in Pakistan. This will help to review the challenges posed by turbulent business condition

for recruitment. To improve the recruitment Strategies of SMEs so that it will play an important

role in the economy of Pakistan.

Research Questions and hypothesis

1. How does COVID-19 influence the recruitment process in SMEs?

2. How does HR department can improve the process of recruitment by adopting new

strategies?

3. How does recruitment can play the critical role in the survival of SMEs, in

these unpredictable business environments?

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Significance of Research

This topic has been chosen due to the large number of SMEs and their contribution towards the

economy of Pakistan in these turbulent business environments. As SMEs cannot afford higher

recruitment costs so they generally look for employees with multiple skills. If the proposed

recruitment strategies imposed successfully so they can play an important role for the survival of

SMEs in Pakistan.

Research Methodology

The chapter presents the methods that will be used to carry out the study. It presents the research

design, study population, sample size, sampling methods, data collection methods and

instruments, procedure for data collection validity and reliability, data management and analysis,

measurement of variables, ethical considerations.

Research Design

We intend to utilise survey approach as my research design. This survey approach will be used

because it’s helps to select a small sample of people from a bigger population. And it is cost-

effective as well. Survey design allows quick collection of raw data and will help us to interact

with the people that have practical experience with the subject of study. Our sample will be

consist of HR departments/managers of SMEs and recruiting firm.

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Our Research will be of confirmatory level in which we will investigate the two variables. We

will use Confirmatory research because the result is more meaningful, in the sense that it is

much harder to claim that a certain result is generalizable beyond the data set.

Our research will be mixture of both qualitative and quantitative study methods because of the

nature of our research.

To find the answer of How COVID-19 Forced HR departments to reconsider their recruitment

Strategies for future. To study this We will use Qualitative study methods.

To calculate the Impact of Covid-19 on the Human Resource of SMEs, Down / right sizing,

absenteeism and statistical data of human resource productivity in work from home strategy. To

study this We will use Quantitative study methods.

Data collection instruments

Data collection instruments will include questionnaires and interviews.

Questionnaires

The study will use a five-Likert scale questionnaire which will be administered to employees of

small businesses. The study will have one set of questionnaires that will be constructed

strategically to capture all the necessary information from all categories of respondents in respect

to the themes of the study and each objective will have at least 10 questions for purposes of

intensive analysis of these objectives. The questionnaire will be administered door to door since

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most of the respondents in this category are known. The Likert scale will be used since they are

very flexible and can be constructed more easily than most other types of attitude scales

(Amin, 2005).

Interviews

Face to face interviews with the help of an interview guide will be conducted among business

directors. The researcher believes that these people can provide rich information in regard to the

study. Interviews will be used, since they are appropriate in providing in-depth data, data

required to meet specific objectives, allows clarity in questioning and quite flexible compared to

questionnaires.

Validity and reliability

The data collection tools will be pretested on a smaller number of respondents from each

category of the population to ensure that the questions will be accurate and clear in line with

each objective of the study thus ensuring validity and reliability.

Validity

The study will adopt content validity which is the degree to which data collected using particular

instruments represents a specific domain of indicators or content of a particular concept. To

ensure content validity of instruments the researcher will construct the instruments with all the

items that measure variables of the study. The researcher will also consult the supervisor for

proper guidance after which the researcher will pre-test the instruments and after pre-testing

ambiguous questions will be removed or polished so as to remain with the finest data required.

To ensure rigour in qualitative process the researcher will use respondent validation process.

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Reliability

In testing the reliability of instruments, the study will adopt the test-retest method which will

involve administering the same instruments twice to the same group of subjects and this will be

done by selecting an appropriate group of respondents, the researcher will then administer

instruments to respondents and then re administer the same instruments to another group after a

week and the results of the two periods will be correlated to obtain the coefficient of reliability.

Ethical constraints and issues:

Before carrying out this research, ethical clearance will be requested from the university. The

businesses and recruiting firms will be informed about all the information used in our research.

The personal information of all the people who will be the part of this research project will

remain confidential.

Data Analysis

In the study, the instruments that will be used will yield both qualitative and quantitative data.

After respondents have answered questionnaires and interviews, raw data will be cleaned, sorted

46 and condensed into systematically comparable data. Data analysis will be done using the

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Statistical Package for Social Scientists (SPSS), which will help to summarize the coded data

and produce the required statistics in the study.

Quantitative Data

In handling all the objectives of the study, the researcher will use a computer package SPSS

where data will be entered, edited, cleaned and sorted. This program will be used to do univariate

and bi-variate analysis to obtain descriptive data in form of frequencies, percentages, mean and

standard deviations since it will be a five Likert questionnaire and this will help give the general

response towards each question in the Likert scale through the mean values. In establishing the

relationships among variables, bi-variate multivariate analysis in form of Pearson correlation and

regression analysis where necessary will be used to ascertain the magnitude of effect the

dependent variable has on independent variable (Cresswell, 2004). In correlation and regression

analysis, the level of significance will be, P=0.05. Dobson, (2002) stress that it is important to

examine relationships within the data with correlations or regressions. Through correlation

measures, relationships can be studied in depth, limited only by the data available to the

researcher. The main goal of regression analysis is to determine the ranking of the regressors or

an explicit quantification of the relative importance of each regressor for the response.

Qualitative Data

Data analysis of qualitative data in the three objectives of the study will use content analysis

where each piece of work answered in the interview guide will be read through thoroughly to

identify themes where it belongs. The number of times each answer appears will be counted to

obtain the number of responses in each respect.

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Data findings, interpretations:

Our major concerns after survey-based research that the design of strategies and their

implementation in this pandemic. The government order on the closure of all non-essentials

business premises had standstill the SMEs in the traveling and printing sector. Other businesses

under the essentials industry category for domestic needs and necessities of peoples are

continuing their operation, but at a reduced scale. These inevitably led to cash flow problems as

reported by Wahyudi (2014), Craven et al. (2020) and the report of Department of Statistics

Malaysia (2020). Some companies recorded “zero income” after the total business lockdown

during the MCO. The cash flow imbalance occur as the owners are still obligated to make

compulsory expenses such as the staffs’ salary, business loans, rental fees, utilities and other

fixed costs. Even though the commercial banks offered six months moratorium period for all

business loans, not all businesses get benefit from the incentive since they are utilizing other

types of financing method such as the financial leasing.

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Conclusion

In our research we have used different methods to study the impacts of COVID 19 on

recruitment methods. This pandemic has affected our society in different ways. As the world has

faced complete lockdowns for months, the organizations have tried to adopt different ways to

keep the work going. Our prime focus was on SMEs as SMEs sector is the back bone of

Pakistan’s economy. Organizations have adopted practices like work from home during the

lockdown as it was not possible for the employees to travel to work. Online methods of

recruitment like have been used by different organizations. We have discussed their impacts and

effectiveness in our research. It has been proven that the online methods of research are efficient

and cost effective. The organizations need to equip themselves with the modern recruitment

techniques as they are effective even in extraordinary times.

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References

1. Ali, S.M. and N. Sipra, 1998. The Financial Practices of Small and Medium

Enterprises in Pakistan. Konrad Adenauer Foundation Working Paper Series. LUMS:

Lahore.

2. By Ellen yin, June 15,2020: Recruiting in China after COVID-19 HR planning and

talent acquisition for SMEs

3. By Syed Kamran Sherazi, 2013: obstacles to small and medium sized enterprises in Pak.

Principal component analysis approach.

4. Social psoting in Covid-19 recruitment era- milestone HR strategy augmenting social

media recruitment.

5. Saqlain Raza, 2018 DISSECTION OF SMALL BUSINESSES IN PAKISTAN:

ISSUES AND DIRECTIONS (international journal of entrepreneurship)

6. Asian development outlook: What drives innovation in Asia? Special topic: The impact

of the coronavirus outbreak—An update. Asian Development Bank, Manila,

Philippines (2020)

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7. An investigation of the targeting and allocation of post-flood disaster aid for

rehabilitation in Punjab, Pakistan. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 44

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