An evaluation of the recruitment strategies at HiTec - Essay Example

An evaluation of the recruitment strategies at HiTec Theoretical perspectives on recruitment The ability of an organisation to acquire and retain top-quality employees is vital to achieving organisational success. In today’s very competitive job markets throughout the world, it becomes significantly important to identify relevant and effective recruitment strategies to ensure the organisation attracts the most high-skilled employees that can assist the organisation in achieving competitive advantage and gaining market share against competitors. However, organisations, when considering development of an effective recruitment strategy, must consider how to make the organisation attractive to prospective high-skilled employees, clearly communicate the job-specific competencies required in a particular role, and be persistent in exploring many diverse recruitment strategies (Arthur 2006). In highly competitive environments, employees looking for meaningful and rewarding work have many opportunities for gaining lucrative employment, therefore distinguishing from competitors what benefits and rewards a potential employee will receive by applying to the organisation assists in attracting more qualified applicants. This assertion is underpinned by Expectancy Theory, suggesting that individuals will adopt a specific behaviour according to the level of potential benefits they will receive for engaging in the behaviour (Montana and Charnov 2008). Therefore, if an organisation wants to increase the volume of applying recruits, the advantages and rewards of working with an organisation must be clearly communicated to differentiate from competitors also seeking top quality talent. For an organisation seeking to achieve competitive advantages, human capital is one of the most high-valued assets of the organisation (Sinha and Thaley 2013). Hence, turnover rates are a major consideration for the organisation as there is always a risk that an inability to retain high-skilled employees could erode competitive edge for the organisation. Gustafson (2002) asserts that costs of training a single new employee can cost a firm between $3000 and $10,000. Today, it is likely these costs have increased as a result of inflation. Hence, there is a significant economic advantage to recruiting the most viable candidates and ensuring they are retained. Background on the case study The case study organisation, HiTec International, has experienced significant economic and competitive success in the IT industry. However, it is a fast-moving industry, meaning that technology evolves so quickly that existing employee skills cannot often keep up with the pace of this technological evolution. Hence, employee skills become redundant and unable to keep up with the pace of IT innovations. Even though HiTec is a young company, the firm has managed to build a very quality reputation as a superior employment opportunity, which contributes to low turnover rates at the organisation and high desire to be employed by HiTec in the labour pool. Despite this high level of interest with potential job candidates, HiTec still faces struggles filling vacancies as the labour pool does not provide the type of talent and expertise needed in a high innovation environment. If HiTec focuses on recruiting graduates to fill these vacancies, they will require training to keep up with the fast-paced evolutions in technology that support business operations as graduate maintain limited experience in modern IT. As illustrated by Gustafson (2002), this can be very costly from a financial perspective without guarantees of return on investment in a business environment where many graduates recruited struggle to keep up with the pace of technology development. Therefore, it is more conducive to keeping recruitment efforts low-cost, which makes recruitment of high-skilled employees already working in competing companies more viable for HiTec as this strategy reduces the need for ongoing and costly training to ensure recruited graduates are capable of keeping up with the pace of technology development. Primary issues facing HiTec HiTec currently has an insufficient recruitment methodology, consisting of headhunters and newspaper advertisements. Whilst this strategy brings the organisation thousands of applicants, these advertisements are not grabbing the attention of high-skilled employees with strong skills in advancements in modern IT technologies. Hence, for all of the time invested sorting through these applications, the company still maintains vacancies as not all applicants maintain the proper skill-sets needed to give the organisation competitive advantage. Furthermore, headhunters working for various agencies come with a high price tag for their services and there is a risk that recruited employees brought in by these agencies will be lured to competition in the near future after being hired. Hence, headhunters represent high-risk scenarios with considerable economic burdens for using these services. In an environment where it is necessary to have high-skilled talent that can keep up with the pace of innovation, risk that headhunter-procured talent will simply defect to competition is an unacceptable HR risk. Short-term solutions With headhunters representing such high costs without guarantee of return on this investment, the business maintains opportunities to utilise social networking as a very low cost opportunity for recruitment (Jacobs 2009). Additionally, job seekers maintain a general belief that social networking is reliable and effective which is making social media one of the most primary methods by which job seekers engage with companies (Kluemper and Rosen 2009). Social media is an excellent source of word of mouth and a study conducted by Hoye, Van Hooft and Lievens (2009), the researchers found that positive word of mouth was directly correlated with achieving organisational appeal and therefore builds incentives for job seekers to actually apply to the organisation using social media. HiTec also maintains opportunities to recruit high-skilled individuals from overseas to fill vacancies in an environment where recruiting top-skilled domestic labourers is difficult. For example, India maintains a very diverse and high-skilled labour pool in software development amid a government-sponsored national environment where information technology education has created a highly techno-savvy labour pool (Bhatnagar 2006). By communicating and promoting superior compensation and benefits packages, experts with advanced skills in IT from around the world can be attracted using social media and various web-based job boards that are accessible to foreign expertise. Furthermore, whilst HiTec has a low turnover rate, it is still advantageous to ensure that more employees do not exit the company. This means appealing to employees’ needs for improving job satisfaction. The business can identify through the use of qualitative interviews which employees genuinely seek a long-term relationship with the organisation that will provide knowledge as to which employees would be most viable for training and development. Schmidt (2010) identifies that there is a direct correlation between training emphasis and job satisfaction. Instead of providing costly and time-consuming IT training for all employees, the most valuable employees that legitimately want to remain with the company can be identified and training custom-tailored to fit their individual skills and needs for training. This would ensure that the firm is not spending significant economic resources on company-wide training, but only for those who are the most motivated and dedicated to elongate the employment relationship with HiTec. Long-term solutions The most viable long-term solution is working in partnership with universities to develop training courses that align student skills with real-world technological evolutions. Internships and apprentice programs are also highly-valuable for creating congruency with theoretical knowledge and practical, experiential knowledge in IT systems. This would require creating a new division for recruitment at HiTec that would maintain responsibility for collaboration with today’s higher education institutions and maintaining governance and control over such recruited students. Muehlemann and Wolter (2013) assert that apprenticeships have a very measurable return on investment for firms utilising this strategy. This strategy would not only increase the existing labour pool for talented experts, but provide a new type of metric for measuring skills development to ensure that the most talented apprentices and interns are easily recruited without high expenditure for headhunters and other recruitment strategies. The company can also seek strategies to improve the overall market attractiveness of the organisation. This would require more emphasis on promotional activity as a recruitment marketing tool, such as creating online videos of contented and highly-satisfied workers offering publicised testimonials about why they enjoy working with HiTec. Research supports that many people listen intently to peer testimonials and trust in such sentiments which influences behaviour against these peer opinions (Nielsen 2009). Hence, the company can consider posting videos in social media or other recruitment websites which illustrate what drives existing employee satisfaction that will give HiTec a better reputation for creating a worthwhile environment to maintain longevity of the employment relationship. The pay systems at HiTec are already highly competitive with many perks to employment and such marketing and promotion efforts would simply reiterate the many remuneration advantages and supplementary benefits that would be attractive to the high-skilled job seeker. Furthermore, improving retention strategies could be a long-term advantage. Through internal research (i.e. qualitative interviews and surveys), the company can identify what specific needs are the most dominant with the existing employee base. This would allow the company to focus more strongly on these specific desires and steer away from retention efforts that are not conducive to retention return on investment from the perspective of the firm’s current employees. This would improve efficiency of retention efforts and allow the company to avoid the high costs of maintaining emphasis on aspects not necessarily important to the employees. This would also serve as a control metric for ensuring efficiency in retention efforts that could provide long-term quantitative statistics on turnover reduction success or failure. References Arthur, D. (2006). Recruiting, interviewing, selecting & orienting new employees, 4th edn. New York: AMACOM Books. Chandra, V. (2006). Technology, adaptation and exports: how some developing countries got it right. Washington: The World Bank. Gustafson, C.M. (2002). Staff turnover: retention, International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, 14(3), pp.106-110. Hoye, G., Van Hooft, E.A.J. and Lievens, F. (2009). Networking as a job search behaviour: a social network perspective, Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 82(3), pp.661-682. Jacobs, D. (2009). Surviving the social explosion, Landscape Management, 48, pp.10-13. Montana, P.J. and Charnov, B.H. (2008). Management, 4th edn. Barron’s Educational Series, Inc. Kluemper, D. and Rosen, P. (2009). Future employment selection methods: evaluating social networking websites, Journal of Managerial Psychology, 246, pp.567-579. Muehlemann, S. and Wolter, S.C. (2013). Return on investment of apprenticeship systems for enterprises: evidence from cost-benefit analyses, European Expert Network on Economics of Education. [online] Available at: http://www.izajolp.com/content/pdf/2193-9004-3-25.pdf (accessed 20 July 2015). Nielsen. (2009). Online global survey – April 2009. [online] Available at: http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/news/2009/global-advertising-consumers-trust-real-friends-and-virtual-strangers-the-most.html (accessed 21 July 2015). Schmidt, S.W. (2010). The relationship between job training and job satisfaction: a review of the literature, International Journal of Adult Vocational Education and Technology, 1(2). Sinha, V. and Thaley, P. (2013). A review on changing trends of recruitment practice to enhance the quality of hiring in global organisations, Management, 18, pp.141-156. Read More