The Recruitment and Selection as a Human Resources Process - Coursework Example

The paper “The Recruitment and Selection as a Human Resources Process" is an intriguing example of coursework on human resources. The newspaper article entitled “EU Crack Down on Price-Fixing” published in the “Wall Street Journal, European Edition” is quite a revelation of the current trends in HR outsourcing. According to the article, six recruitment agencies were fined a total of around £39 million by the competition watchdog of the U.K. The fine was due to the collective boycott in providing candidates to a construction company and for illegal price-fixing over recruiting candidates. This article thus focuses on the current trend of outsourcing candidates and various issues related to it.

Recruitment agencies:
Those organizations, which take over the recruitment and selection process of other organizations as a part of the outsourcing business, are referred to as recruitment agencies. The recruitment agencies of the U.K also undertake the process of recruitment and selection of personnel from various industries as a part of the HR outsourcing process. The focus of these U.K agencies is recruiting both temporary and full-time personnel starting from junior/ operational level employees to mid and senior-level employees like managers and chief executives.

“Recruitment and Selection” as an HR process is dynamic and extensive in nature and includes various elements like job analysis and description, job advertisement, shortlisting of candidates and finally selecting the right person for the right position. The process of being an extensive one is increasingly being outsourced to specialized recruitment firms/ agencies by various organizations cutting across industries. (Pynes, 2004; Armstrong, 2006)

Advantages and Disadvantages:
This new trend of outsourcing has various benefits and attractions attached to it for an organization. It not only saves an organization of its valuable resources like time, money and manpower but also helps it focus on its basic activities and core competencies. The recruitment and selection as an HR process need a relatively huge investment both in terms of infrastructure and time, thus making it more reasonable for a company to outsource the entire process.

The recruitment firms/ agencies use their expertise in the process of advertising the position and inviting applicants, handling candidate queries, setting up the selection process, sorting out the relatively better candidates, verifying and checking qualifications and references and finally selecting a few of the best fits. Thus, the expertise these “Recruitment and Selection” agencies have not only makes them a reliable source for new recruits but also helps the client organization to access the huge database of desired candidates.

However, outsourcing the “Recruitment process” to agencies also has some disadvantages. In many cases, it was found that “recruitment agencies” acts in favor of some organization while recruiting the best available candidates. For instance, in the news mentioned above wherein, six recruitment agencies were fined by the competition watchdog of the U.K for illegally boycotting an organization and fixing prices, it clearly exposes the risk associated with outsourcing the recruitment process.

Conclusions:
Thus it can be clearly concluded that the outsourcing of the recruitment process not only has some advantages but also comes with some loopholes associated with it. It becomes problematic when recruitment agencies resort to collusion and together they start acting like business cartels, as has been found recently in the U.K. Moreover, such illegal activities not only poses a problem to various client organization but also damages the reputation and credibility of various recruitment firms/agencies.