Critically evaluate the contributions that human resource management can make to the achievement of an organisation's strategic goals and objectives. Illustrate your answer with examples. In today's tumultuous times, the challenges businesses face to remain competitive have changed rapidly. With continuous technological innovations, companies have fought hard with competitors to establish and maintain their competitive advantage. However, in today's economy, access to capital and technology has become less critical than acquiring and retaining skilled workers. In a knowledge-based economy, it is important for companies to be more strategic in how they operate. Human resources management today must be strategic to meet the company's business needs. At the same time, it cannot lose sight of the critical value and importance of people in making these strategies a reality. With this in mind, it is now necessary to look at human resource management from a different perspective so that it can contribute to the achievement of the business purpose and objectives. Human resource management (HRM) has always played a role in contributing to the success of the company directly or indirectly. Like other areas of management, human resource management is involved in setting policies, formulating plans, and attempting to make decisions that benefit both the company and its staff. Above all, the driving force behind the company's success is its people. They provide the company with the competitive advantage and are the most valuable resource for the company. It is therefore important that human resource management helps the company to effectively and efficiently manage its human resources and to have activities that complement and promote business growth."...... half of the document ... ...new company success Therefore, human resource management is necessary to provide the overall support to ensure that the company's strategic goals and objectives can be achieved. Reference list: 1 John Bratton Strategic Human Resource Management. URL: http://www.palgrave.com/. business/brattonandgold/docs/bgcha02.pdf2 (2002) Business-oriented human resource management: a best practice model West Sussex, England John Wiley & Sons, Ltd3 Haig R . Nalbantian, Richard A. Guzzo, Dave Kieffer and Jay Doherty (2004) Capitalize on your strengths, managing internal labor markets in a sustainable way. Competitive Advantage USA McGraw-Hill4. Raymond Stone (2002) 4th Resource Management humanAustralia John Wiley & Sons5 2008 Strategic Human Resource ManagementURL: http://www.cipd.co.uk/subjects/corpsrtgy/general/strathrm.htm