The Process of Recruitment of the New Employees - Essay Example

Introduction Every organization needs a human workforce in order to remain in operation, which means that at some point, the organization needs to identify and hire more people to fill some posts in the organization. The process of recruitment and selection is the one used by an organization to identify, interview, hire, train and introduce new employees into the organization (Cooper and Robertson, 2000). To breakdown these terms, the recruitment process refers to the steps that the organization takes to identify the places that need to be filled up in an organization, decide on the necessary requirements for these posts and ask interested candidates to send their applications for consideration for the posts (Cooper and Robertson, 2000). Conversely, the selection process starts when the applications from the interested candidates are received, when the organization now performs short-listing and determination of the best candidates for the job (Cooper and Robertson, 2000). In this process of recruitment and selection, the organization tries to identify those individuals with the right skill sets to work in the organization, and before they are inducted into the organization, they have to be interviewed and trained to attain the skills that they need to perform the tasks that they are being hired for. In the hiring process, the organization can decide to perform external or internal recruitment and selection, where the candidates are chosen from within or outside the organization. The selection process for the employees can involve many processes, but the most common one is the selection interview, where the potential candidate is put in front of a panel and interviewed to determine the ability to work for the organization (Cooper and Robertson, 2000). The selection interview process has been criticized by many experts, but many organizations still prefer to use it for the selection process. This paper will therefore go on to determine why many employees prefer using the selection interview process. As part of the selection process, many organizations will usually conduct interviews to determine the competences of the different applicants and select the best applicant for the job. The selection interview process is used by the employer as an assessment or evaluation of the potential employee for the job at hand. The selection interview process can take many different formats, for example, the telephone interview used by the interview before any other interview. The telephone interview is usually used by the employer before any other interview process, and is used as a way of reducing potential applicants for the job (Warr, 2003). After the pre-interview phase, the other formats include the panel interview, which is the most common format used by employers. In this format, the potential employee faces a panel of between one and three people who ask varying questions of the employee. Other formats include the technical interview, where the potential employee is asked questions aimed at testing their problem solving and creativity prowess. This is similar to the stress interview format, where the potential employee faces different successive interviewers. This interview format is used to unbalance the potential employee and determine their capacity to handle stressful situations. There are also group interviews used in some situations, where the potential candidates are interviewed together to determine those with leadership skills or the candidates who perform better than the rest. Lastly, some employees might use the case interview process, where the potential candidates are given cases relating to the job and asked to resolve the situation or problem. The commonest format of the selection interview is the panel interview, where the potential employee faces a panel of interviewers who ask questions to determine competency (Macan, 2009). These questions are usually divided into two categories, structured and unstructured interview questions. Structured interview questions usually involve having all candidates answer the same type of questions that can then be rated by the interviewer. Conversely, unstructured interviews are open-ended; the interviewer asks any questions to gauge the candidate. According to Macan (2009), the commonest interview format used by employees is the panel interview, where potential candidates are interviewed by a panel that determines competency. The selection interview has been reported as the commonest selection tool in the recruitment and selection process. From research, the use of selection interviews is evidently the tool of choice for most organizations, with over 90% of firm in the United States and the United Kingdom using the tool for selection (Schmitt and Borman, 2003). In large organizations, more than one type of selection process is used, and more than one interview format can be utilized to select the best candidates for the post. In these cases, the interviewers will most likely choose more than one interview process to eliminate candidates and select the best applicant for the job required. However, for small organizations, the interview process is primarily used to select candidates for the job. Other processes that can be used in these organizations include the analysis of the bio-data of the applicants, which is collected from the resumes and application forms (Macan, 2009). The bio-data is used to trim the candidates and select the best, who then face the interview process. The selection interview is the commonest form of selection tool since it is flexible, and can be used by the organization to analyze the candidates’ skills, abilities, attitudes and required qualifications. In this case, the commonest formats used are the panel interviews, where the candidates face interviewers and discuss the relevant issues. In an analysis of the use of the interview as a selection tool, the two most analyzed factors are the reliability and validity of the interview and its results. The reliability of an interview process refers to the degree to which two measures of the same variable gives consistent results, while the validity of the interview process describes the degree to which the results actually reflect the true qualities of the interviewee (McDaniel et al, 1994). When reliability is used to describe interviews, two measures are commonly used, the first one being inter-reliability, which refers to the probability of two different interviewers giving the same results when they interview the same candidate. The second measure is intra-reliability, which refers to the degree to which the same interviewer gives consistent ratings when interviewing different candidates. As previously mentioned, there are different structures of interviews, and from research, it is evident that, as the structure of the interview drops, so does the reliability of an interview process. For example, structured interviews have been shown to display the best reliability ratings, while semi-structured and unstructured interviews display decreasing ranks of reliability. The main challenge of achieving reliability in an interview is that each interview, candidate and interviewer is different in some way, meaning that the results are likely to be different. The validity of an interview refers to the degree to which the true representation of the interviewee in the interview is achieved. Because of the high competition in the job selection process, interviewees will always tend to portray themselves in the best possible way so as to win the process. This means that the interview process has to be carefully analyze in order to achieve validity (Campion, Palmer and Campion, 2000). All of the skills that are tested or discussed in the selection interview process have different impacts on job performance, so the analysis of the validity of an interview has to take into account these differences. Some of the factors tested in the interview process are usually job related, situational or the psychological constructs of the potential employee. From research, it is seen that the predictive validity of the interview is usually 0.51, which rises to 0.63 when the interview is combined with psychometric tests (Campion, Palmer and Campion, 2000). For job related, situational or psychological interviews, the validities have been shown to be 0.6, 0.39 and 0.29 respectively. The validity of interviews is based on the format chosen, for example, with low-level organizations; the situational interview format is usually used because of its relative simplicity. However, for larger organizations, the behavioral interview format is usually used since it can reflect the performance of the candidate in past situations or employment. As can be seen, the main purpose of the interview process is to identify candidates who best fit the organization hiring model. However, since the validity and reliability of the interview is not assured, it is evident that the interview can go wrong. In this case, the interview going wrong happens when the employer hires and individual who is not best suited for the job, or is not the best candidate from the selection pool. The first reason why interviews fail is due to the development of bias by the interviewer, which leads to the selection of less than suitable candidates (Campion, Palmer and Campion, 2000). For example, the interviewer could be biased based on the perceived characteristics of an individual. An example of this is shown by research, which shows that interviewers are usually subconsciously biased towards Caucasians in the interview process as opposed to mixed race individuals (Purkiss, 2006). Another factor that can make the interview process go wrong is the competition among the candidates, which leads to them faking some characteristics in order to pass the interview process (Dipboye et al, 2012). The first example, bias, tests the reliability of the interview, where different interviews might be differently biased and thus give different ratings for similar candidates. In the case of candidate faking, the validity of the interview is affected, since the true representation of the candidate is not obtained (Warr, 2003). Both of these factors indicate that the selection interview might not be the best way of selection, since the factors that determine it can be influenced by the outside environment. For an organization to improve the selection interview process and get the best candidates for the job, the two factors that should be addressed are the reliability and validity of the interview process. The reliability of the interview can be addressed in one simple way, by increasing the structure of the interview (Campion, Palmer and Campion, 2000). As already stated, the reliability of an interview process drops as the structure of the interview is reduced, which means that an organization should move from the unstructured to the semi-structured to the structured interview set. Conversely, the validity of the interview process can be increased to suit the organization. According to Campion, Palmer and Campion (2000), the highest validity for interviews occurred when the interviewer used situational and job-related questions, meaning that these tend to make the interview more valid. The other way of increasing the validity of the interview process is also by increasing the structure of the interview, which tends to increase the validity coefficient of the interview. Lastly, the best way to increase the validity of the interview process is by testing job performance of the employee as opposed to considering the tenure of the candidate as a measure. This ensures that the interviewee is tested based on competency. Conclusion From the analysis done above, it can be see that the interview is the commonest selection tool used by most companies in the selection and interview process. However, the reliability and validity of the process gives doubt to the effectiveness of this tool in the selection of the best candidates. Criticisms of the interview process stem from the lack of reliability and validity of the process, since the different formats usually give different results. However, as shown above, the reliability and validity of the selection interview can be improved by changing some factors of the interview. As shown, the best way of achieving reliability and validity of the interview is by increasing the structure of the interview process, which increases both the reliability and validity coefficients (Motowidlo et al, 2000). Other ways include the analysis of the organizational type and selecting the best format for the interview. For example, for large organizations, the use of different interviews serves to reduce the unreliability of the process, which tends to give the best candidates for the interview. From the analysis, it is true that the criticisms of the interview process are valid, but these can be corrected using the factors that improve the reliability and validity of the interview process. The selection interview is still the simplest and commonest way of identifying candidates in the recruitment and selection process, and with an improvement of the reliability and validity of the results, it is possible to reduce the criticisms against the process. References Campion, M. A, Palmer, D. K and Campion, D. E 2000. ‘A Review of Structure in the Selection Interview’. Personnel Psychology, Vol. 50, 655-702. Cooper, C. L and Robertson, I. T 2000. International Review of Industrial and Organizational Psychology. Wiley, New York. Dipboye, R. L., Macan, T, and Shahani-Denning, C 2012. The selection interview from the interviewer and applicant perspectives. The Oxford Handbook of Personnel Assessment and Selection. 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