Marketing departments, governments and policymakers all around the world have increasingly started embracing the field of behavioural sciences in improving the design of products and services, enhancing communications, improving managerial decision-making, encouraging desired behaviour by stakeholders and, more generally, creating a human-centric marketplace. Within organisations, the human resources management (HRM) function is perhaps the one place that acknowledges that humans are central to the organisation’s success, so it is critical that HRM too actively embraces the insights and methods of behavioural sciences. In this article, I provide an overview of the behavioural sciences, discuss how HRM can benefit from an in-depth knowledge of the science and illustrate specific examples from recruitment processes, training and communications, incentive design, employee-oriented processes, and diversity and inclusion initiatives that could benefit from evidence from behavioural sciences.
