Effect of Devolved Recruitment and Selection Practices on Employee Performance at Nakuru County Government Headquarters

Abstract

Following the promulgation of the new constitution of Kenya in 2010, several functions previously done by the central government were devolved to the counties. County government of Nakuru, one of the major counties, has various human resource functions that have been devolved from the central government of Kenya; these include devolved recruitment and selection function. This change in and of itself is expected to affect employee performance. The researchers sought to establish the extent to which the devolved practices in the recruitment and selection functions have affected employee performance given that no information was available to this end. The specific objectives were to evaluate the effect of awareness of county’s human resource strategies on employee performance, to assess effect of county’s policy for management of attrition and turnover on employee performance and to analyze the effect of the county’s human resource needs on employee performance. A survey was carried out within Nakuru County Government Headquarters which has a workforce of 301 permanent employees. The study adapted a descriptive research design. Stratified random sampling technique was employed and a sample size of 93 respondents was determined using Nassiuma’s formula. A questionnaire was used to collect data and results were presented in tables and figures. Both descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyze the data with the aid of Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS). The findings showed that the awareness of the human resource strategies by the county’s HR executives (r = 0.374, p = 0.000), county’s structured policy for management of attrition and turnover (r = 0.391, p = 0.000) and the county’s human resource needs that are systematically ascertained with an appropriate plan formulated for satisfying these needs ( r = 0.455, p = 0.000) were moderately and positively correlated to employee performance. The study therefore recommends that devolved recruitment and selection practices striving to achieve high performance should be given first priority by the human resource practitioners at the county. . Keywords: Devolved Recruitment and Selection practices, Human resource policy for management of attrition and turnover, Human resource needs, Human Resource strategy, Employee Performance.