Investigating the Factors Affecting Human Resource Planning after Large-scale Natural Disasters: A Case Study on the Bam Earthquake

Human Resource Planning (HRP) plays a pivotal role in organizations through providing the balance between supply and demand for qualified human resources; in times of crisis, especially those cases with large number of fatalities, HRP will become even more important. In the case of Bam earthquake in 2003, the public education system of the region, with around 32000 students and 2700 teachers, was heavily struck by loss of around 900 teachers. The present research, therefore, aims to investigate the various factors affecting the implementation of HRP in the studied case, through a qualitative method (case study), using semi-structured interviews as well as archived documents. Our findings delineate that a variety of factors affect human resource planning after large-scale natural disasters, the most outstanding of which being the access to reliable information and statistics, as well such social factors as immigrations to and from the region due to the disaster, or other population factors like birth rate during the decade after the disaster. Classifying the factors and proposing a model for this planning in similar future disasters is another contribution of this paper.