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Client issue clear.  However, I think you could state the overall research objective more succinctly, e.g.

·         How can the UN improve its recruitment processes?

Then let the other issues emerge in your research.

Then  I suggest you state your specific research sub-objectives as:

·         What are the current UN recruitment procedures?

·         What are the issues in the recruitment process?

·         How can the UN improve the process?

·         Evaluate the costs and benefits of improving the process   ????

Let these issues emerge in your qualitative interviews (you will need to do more than one)

‘Other questions that I considered when determining my research were: How to make recruitment faster? Does the UN not maximize its unique position to be a driver of change because it doesn’t have the necessary talent readily available? Does the UN waste funds because of the laborious hiring process? How could the UN make the process more accessible?’

How are you going to do your quantitative research?  I don’t think a survey is feasible – would you consider doing a cost-benefit analysis and assign monetary values to the ‘costs’ of the current system and the ‘benefits’ and ‘costs’ of what you propose as improvements?

Another facet you could consider is current govt. Recruitment policy as it has similar time and bureaucratic tendencies.

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15101983

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Cover sheet and Declaration on Plagiarism

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Cover sheet and Declaration on Plagiarism

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DCU Research Ethics and Consents Guidelines

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DCU Research Ethics and Consents Guidelines

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The client brief has been amended based on the initial feedback provided.

The organization that I am going to be researching on behalf on is the United Nations Secretariat, one of the six main bodies of the UN system. The UN came into existence on 1945, when 51 countries came together in San Francisco to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind”[1], as its charter preamble reads.

Some of the management challenges facing the UN Secretariat include:

1) Inadequate financial support from member states i.e. budget constraints, long standing dues from assessed contributions. For this reason, in recent years the UN have had to limit programs. Namely, The United States cut, in 2011, all his extra budgetary contribution ($3.7m yearly) to UNESCO, as a retaliation for having admitted Palestine[2] leading to massive layoffs which were conductive to unfinished programes.

2) Inadequate physical (logistics, communications technology and infrastructure) and human resources. The UN Secretariat, though initially conceived as a conference service staff for its Member States (translation and interpretation, materials distribution etc), it has evolved into a program delivery body, therefore its regulations must evolve accordingly, as it is not the same to secretariat for a few hundred thousand meetings a year than monitor and spend $63bn annually (Oil-for-Food programme).

A unique position to problem solve and drive change in the world. Reform management is a must for the UN if it wants to succeed and use that position to create meaningful change and avoid WWIII.

A management problem that I have identified that requires action is the issue of staff recruitment (regulated under ST/SGB/2014/1 of 1 January 2014) to the UN. The UN, as established in its charter requires (article 101) the highest standards of efficiency, competence, and integrity for its  staff. There is 40,000 staff and 102,000 troops[3]under the command of the UN Secretary-General, deployed in five duty stations (New York, Geneva, Vienna, Santiago, and Nairobi) and 16 Peacekeeping Operations[4], scattered across the world, where frequently offices in a single country are separated by 800 kilometers and staff and troops need to be deployed in hazardous conditions, i.e. landlocked countries or simply lack of roads due to the ongoing wars. However, managers do not have it easy to deliver: on average it takes 213 days to recruit new staff. Recently the UN instituted a new system of recruitment that may extend that to over 365 days.

As stated by the Boards of Auditors (A/71/5 (Vol. I), “it is vital that the United Nations make best use of its key resource, its workforce. It has, however, made limited progress against the Board’s previous concerns about the lack of strategic workforce planning. Key human resources performance indicators are not being achieved, and management continues to be hampered by a lack of accurate, timely and reliable information” and ¨161. Effective workforce management plays a critical role in an organization’s ability to achieve its objectives. In addition to delivering the right skills for the right job at the right time, organizations should provide opportunities for staff members to learn and develop skills as their careers progress and organizational priorities change, and manage and incentivize staff performance. Organizations also need to be able to deploy staff flexibly and measure how effectively staff are utilized” Therefore, in light of the above, the purpose of this research is to determine how the UN can improve its recruitment processes to better save the world.

[1] http://www.un.org/en/sections/un-charter/un-charter-full-text/[2] https://unesco.usmission.gov/mission/contributions1.html[3]http://www.un.org/en/peacekeeping/documents/Yearly.pdf[4]http://www.un.org/en/peacekeeping/operations/current.shtml

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The research brief and research design have been amended based on the feedback provided.

The general research objectives will be to determine how the UN can improve its recruitment processes.

The specific research sub-objectives are:
What are the current UN recruitment procedures?
What are the issues in the recruitment process?
How can the UN improve the process?
How much could be saved by improving the process (cost / benefit analysis).

I am hoping that this research will give me a new perspective, and fresh insight into recruitment practices at the United Nations.

I will design the research to achieve these objectives by completing 1 qualitative research method and 1 quantitative research method.

The qualitative research method that I plan to use is an in depth interview. I will conduct an in-depth interview with a personal contact at the UN and HR recruitment specialists (either 1 or 2, depending on time constraints). I will use the interview to ask him questions about the hiring process. The questions I’m currently planning to ask may include: How to make recruitment faster? Does the UN waste funds due to the long and laborious hiring process? Do they know people that have dropped out of recruitment due to the wait time? Has they personally noticed gaps in the staff due to the long recruitment times? How could the UN make the process more accessible?

The quantitative research method that I plan to use is a cost benefit analysis, by assigning monetary values to the 'costs' of the current system and the 'benefits' and 'costs' of what I will propose at improvements.

The research is Explanatory. I've chosen this method because I have a clearly defined problem and I would like to determine why it exists and what can be done to improve it.

I will need to get information from the data collection phases that will help shape my perspectives on the recruitment process and

I will conduct the quantitative phase in the immediate future (the cost/benefit analysis). The qualitative phase of the project will be completed in December due to time constraints of the participants.

In order to complete the qualitative phase of the research, I will reach out to a contact that I have at the UN, as well as HR professionals that may help me to identify issues with the UN, as well as help me to determine potential solutions.

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The secondary sources that I have consulted for this project are news journals such as The New York Times and a large number of documents available at United Nations websites i.e. reports from Advisory Committee on Administrative and Budgetary Questions (ACABQ)[1], Board of Auditors[2], Fifth Committee of the United Nations General Assembly[3], as well as independent websites for potential candidates.

The New York Times provided an opinion piece [4]from a former Assistant Secretary-General for Field Support, Anthony Banbury, who expressed alarm at the large amounts of "red tape" within the Organization. He stated that currently it takes 213 days to hire somebody for a position within the UN, and now new hiring practices being initiated in the UN will lead to recruitment processing times of over a year, clashing this way with its Peacekeeping Operations which are mandated by the UN Security Council only for one year at the time. ASG Banbury was the Head of UN Mission for Ebola Emergency Response (UNMEER) and used this experience to shed light into the difficulties to deliver his mandate under the current obscure and obstructive staffing practices. This conflicted article was the inspiration and foundation of this project.

I have used the UN's own recruitment regulations to understand the formal process of hiring, and to understand where the potential improvements in the hiring process may come from, which ties in with the key objective of the project, which is to find ways to improve the recruitment process.

I have also accessed a website from an independent blogger that runs a "Jobs List'", to help potential recruits to find jobs and to understand the complex hiring processes that the UN undertake. This helped me to understand further the complexities of the current processes of recruitment and the issues that it currently faces.

Additionally, the U.S. Department of State provides a guide for U.S. citizens seeking jobs at international organizations such as the U.N - which again has been useful in researching the sub-objective of how the U.N. currently engages in recruitment.

For my quantitative research method, a cost / benefit analysis will be completed because it is a simple tool to measure the possible improvements in the hiring process.

[1] http://www.un.org/ga/acabq/[2] http://www.un.org/en/auditors/board/[3] http://www.un.org/en/ga/fifth/[4]http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/20/opinion/sunday/i-love-the-un-but-it-is-failing.html?_r=0

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Planning the Quantitative Phase (first phase)

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Planning the Quantitative Phase (first phase)

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In this quantitative phase, the following will be examined:

Cost of turnover; how much it costs to train and recruit new employees; productivity levels with new employees during training and the cost of this for the organization and other employees; finally I will look at why people are leaving – and perhaps provide costings for training, induction, improving recruitment processes, internal communication and culture and indicate how relevant improvements may cost less than continuing with an extremely low turnover.

I think that these will help me to answer my research objectives because they cover the scope of what I am looking to find out.

The respondent for this phase will be an employee at the United Nations.

For my quantitative phase, I am going to complete a Cost Benefit Analysis. This may be the only effective method of completing quantitative research.

This this phase of the research will be conducted online. This because it’s the quickest way to produce information in this scenario.

Any data ascertained will be recorded on a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet.

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Field Research for Quantitative Phase - what you did

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Field Research for Quantitative Phase - what you did

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The research was conducted over a three-day period. The respondent was asked for answers to the criteria that was confirmed, and they communicated that they’d be able to provide answers once the working week began).

What I planned didn’t work exactly. The cost benefit analysis couldn’t be completed in a conventional manner due to the special / unique organization that is the UN. My respondent informed me that the UN doesn’t measure efficiencies in monetary terms, but rather in terms of how inefficiencies affect their ability to implement their mandate – which is to develop policies and programs to deal with issues across the world – in other terms, the benefits are intangible and monetary values can’t be attached.

The respondent however was able to provide me with relevant data about cumulative salaries of underperforming employees, cumulative salaries for non-recruited employees, number of rotations of employees, IT and office space and overtime costs – which give an insight into efficiencies at the UN overall.

The data was recorded by inputting it into an Excel spreadsheet.

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Initial Results / Findings - first phase of primary research

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Initial Results / Findings - first phase of primary research

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UN doesn’t measure inefficiencies by financial cost, as a public body. They consider inefficiencies as a hindrance to conducting their work aka implementing their mandate, which is to develop policies and programs to deal with issues across the world.

Inefficiencies in the hiring process cost the respondents department $784,510.47 in 2015. This figure is comprised of: underperforming staff, non-recruited staff, IT and Office and overtime costs.

As international civil servants, UN staff have a unique statute. They have numerous guarantees and thus, to prohibit biases managers, they cannot be laying off until the end of their assignment and those on permanent contracts (the great majority) are guaranteed another appointment  – we can see the inefficiency of this policy in the value of the salaries of underperformers in the department, which were $278,077.92.

The respondent’s department has 3 HR staff to deal with recruiting for a staffing table of 70, with salaries of approximately $300,000. This is the closest available figure that gave a monetary value of recruiting in the UN.

Non-recruited staff costs were $463,463.20. These are salaries contributed by member states for posts that couldn’t be filled due to inefficient hiring practices.

Overtime costs, to make for the underperforers could be estimated at  $9,600. These are additional costs , despite non recruited salaries costing $463,463.20. If the respondents department had all the necessary posts filled – this cost wouldn’t have been incurred.

Temporary promotions (Special Post Allowances) are only approved for a three month period – there is no consistency or motivation for the staff to apply for temporary positions because there is no job security associated with them. There is therefore no internal promotion system, which leads to UN staff expending about a 30% (it is said in the UN hallways) of their times in applying for higher posts.

In my respondent’s department, there are currently 10 unfilled positions due to the inefficient hiring processes. Six are over six months, one over a year.

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Tentative Conclusions and recommendations - first phase of primary research

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Tentative Conclusions and recommendations - first phase of primary research

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Conclusion: The UN isn’t maximizing its potential because despite having the funding for more employees – HR practices mean that the funding isn’t being utilized for its designated purpose.

Conclusion: Inefficient and bureaucratic HR rules are preventing UN from delivering their mandate.

Conclusion: UN isn’t focused on financial results or profitability. UN measures its success by the competency of staff and their ability to deliver their mandate of developing better policy and programs.

Recommendation: While accountability it's a must when using tax payers money, UN Managers should be afforded more flexibility if they are to met their mandare.

Recommendation: That the UN implement faster hiring processes to become more efficient. This could be done by giving managers more autonomy over who they hire. Additionally, overtime is a further expense that wouldn’t have to be incurred if the organization had the correct amount of staff in posts.

Recommendation: Staff budgets are aligned with realistic mandates. This would help to enhance job stability and satisfaction at the organization, would help to reduce staff turnover.

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Recognized limitations of in depth interviews are: they can be time intensive, require extensive note taking, difficult to compare answers between participants and that you can't ask a large number of people - therefore potentially reducing the reliability of your research.

Recognized limitations of cost / benefit analyses are: that cost and benefits can be adjusted based on subjective views (in effect, one person may view the cost or benefit of an action more or less significantly than another), and that human error when compiling the cost / budget analysis may lead to the overall analysis being inaccurate.

The cost / benefit analysis was impossible to carry out due to the lack of any meaningful data, or any practical way to ascertain said data. This inability to obtain data hindered my quantitative research proposal.

Second phase is yet to be completed to due lack of availability from the interviewees – but will be completed during December 2016.

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Interview Brief - Qualitative Phase (second phase)

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Interview Brief - Qualitative Phase (second phase)

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The data will be collected via Skype interviews.

The questions will be structured because information gathered from structured interviews tends to be more accurate and reliable, as well as being less biased (important particularly for the participant at the UN).

The themes of the interview will be centered around hiring processes at the UN, their personal experiences (either having gone through it themselves or having advised / guided people on doing so), as well as the perceptions in the industry of the hiring process.

I will arrange with the participants a time that is convenient for them. Due to the different times zones (EST vs. GMT), I will have to be extremely flexible.

The participants will be partaking in their interviews during their own time.

The questions will be the same for all participants - of course some of the questions won't be relevant, based on the knowledge, skills and abilities of the participants.

Once we are on our Skype call, I will introduce myself and explain that I'm a student working on a college project "A Study in Hiring Practices at the UN".

I will explain that I'll be asking them a series of questions that relate to hiring practices at the UN. I'll explain that the interview will last for around 45 minutes.

I'll explain why the participant was chosen to be interviewed for the project.

I will state that the interview is being recorded via note taking (I'll be taking the notes).

I'll explain that the interview isn't being observed.

I will explain that the information is solely being used for a college project, and if they want to decline a question or end the interview at any time they are welcome to.

The questions will be as follows:
-What led you to your current position?
-Do you enjoy it?
-How did you become aware of the hiring practices of the UN?
-What are your thoughts on the hiring practices at the UN?
-Can you tell me about these thoughts (this will depend on the answers given)?
-How do you think that the hiring processes can be improved?
-Why do you think the these would be improvements?
-What challenges do you see in the future for the UN due to their hiring practices?
-Do you know of people who have dropped out of the hiring process because of this?
-Does the UN waste money on hiring processes that are excessive?

Towards the end, I'll ask the participants if they want to raise any issues not presented in the interview.

I will inform them that I will email them a copy of the notes taken during the interview.

The interview plan meets the objectives of the research because I think the questions that I'm asking will yield the relevant answers for me to progress with the project.

I will record the data by taking notes during the Skype call.

I plan to analyze the data by reading over the notes from the interviews and summarizing the issues raised in the answers of the participants. Once I have conducted all of the interviews, it will be easier to compare the answers of the different participants and determine the common themes and issues raised by the participants.

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Field Research - Qualitative Phase - what you did

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Field Research - Qualitative Phase - what you did

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Yet to be completed.

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Tentative results / findings and conclusions / recommendations for second phase of primary research

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Tentative results / findings and conclusions / recommendations for second phase of primary research

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Yet to be completed.