When you think of the human resources department the first things that come to your mind are the front line issues that they are there to help us deal with. There are more background issues that not only the company has to have help with but the human resources department has to battle through. The human resources department has a lot of red tape to go through including legal, safety, and regulatory requirements. Throughout this paper, I will go issues by issue and explain what it is they do for the companies, and for us.
To begin lets discuss the legal issues that stand within the human resources department. Some of the legal issues that underlie with recruitment and retention are some very popular and well known acts. Some of the acts relating to unfair discrimination are: The Sex Discrimination Act 1975, The Race Relations Act 1976, The Disability Discrimination Act 1995, The Employment Equality Regulations Act 2003 (religion and belief), and the Employment Equality Regulation Act 2003 ( sexual orientation ). All of these acts have a definite legal bearing on recruitment, hiring, and retention in any company. Before you make a decision on who you may offer incentives to and who you may not, you have to first think about all of the above discrimination acts, because these acts came into place from previous people filing lawsuits for discriminatory treatment in work places. Another example of discrimination is indirect, which occurs when requirements of the job are not fair to everyone. An example of this might be physical requirements that might be fair to one person but another might not be able to perform those. There has been a lot of issues with scams when employers ask for personal information to run background or credit checks as part of the employment screening process. The Data Protection Act of 1988 was put in place and states that personal details, references, and selection records should only be requested and saved when they are relevant to the...