Getting the Best Person for the Job - Essay Example

Running Head: RECRUITMENT AND SELECTION THE FAR THAT RECRUITMENT AND SELECTION PROCESSES UNDER HRM CAN BE CHARACTERIZED AS BEING ABOUT ‘GETTING THE BEST PERSON FOR THE JOB (Name) (Institution’s Name) Introduction Getting the right person for the job is very important because it enables the first class people to do the first class work. Each one of us is endowed with a skill that can enable him/her perform a duty better than every body else. This makes one a first class person in that field where he/she is well endowed with skills. The process of recruitment should be carried out in such away that the first class person gets the first class job in order to get the right person for a certain job. Recruitment is a process of sourcing, screening and also selecting qualified people for a vacancy or a job in an organization. Even though individuals do undertake recruiting processes large and mid sized organizations do retain professional recruiters. Recruiters are persons engaged in recruitment, that is, solicitation of individuals to fill positions or jobs within an organization. Recruiters are therefore divided into two, which is, those that work for multiple clients and also those that work for one organization. The tasks in the hands of many recruitment agencies is attracting as many quality candidates as possible in order to place these candidates in multitude of job opportunities that are offered by the client business. Candidates are placed on a set of criteria such as education, industry or position experience, personal preference and interests, references and finally psycho graphics. All these are aimed at getting the right person for the job in order to experience better results. Many large employers carry out in-house recruitment using the human resources departments in the organization. They do these through making advertisements of job vacancies on their web sites, focusing on campus graduates and coordinating employee referral schemes in their recruitment. According to Legge (2000) the human resource is defined as the combination of performance management, employee relations, administrative personnel functions and resource planning. Human resource deals with the key functions like recruitment strategy planning, hiring process, promotions, performance management and evaluation ,redundancy, record keeping of personal data, employee and industrial relations, pensions, compensations, bonuses and also carrying out internal advice to its internal customers regarding the problems at work. In order to utilize the implicit form of convergence theory in relation to technology, marketing and financial control systems it is argued that competitive advantage can be attained by improving the management of organizational structures and people ,that is, better utilization of human resource .For excellence, human resource management must be practiced. With the failure of the personnel managers to promote potential benefits on effectively managing people, a new approach that establishes human resource management as the main management activity is adopted. The changing political and economic climates in the UK and the USA have in one way or the other reduced trade union pressures on management. Recruitment process being one of the key functions of the Human resources department has several methods namely sourcing, screening and selection and on boarding. Sourcing, refers to the uncovering and identification of talents or candidates through a proactive technique involved in recruitment. Sourcing involves advertisements which is a very common recruiting process that encompasses multi media such as general news paper, internet, professional publications, job centers, window advertisements, campus graduate recruitment programs and job ad news papers. In many occasions people that source for candidates will perform both primary as well as secondary techniques of sourcing in order to identify candidates but in the recent past phone sourcing and internet sourcing has also been on the increase. Actual process of sourcing candidates can be divided into two clearly defined techniques (Storey, 2001) The first is the primary sourcing. It means techniques of leveraging to identify candidates with no presence or limited presence of these individuals in any easily accessible public forum, that is, published list or internet. This requires uncovering of information of candidates through a primary means of directly calling into the organization in order to uncover people’s data, their responsibilities, title and roles. Terms like phone sourcing apply generally in the utilization of technique of primary sourcing. The second is the secondary sourcing. This means using primary technique such as internet and also making use of advanced techniques like Boolean operators in order to identify candidates. Internet sourcing is a good example of secondary sourcing techniques. Sourcing techniques involves mostly identifying passive candidates versus active candidates searching for employment opportunities. A good example of proactive techniques of sourcing include use of Boolean operators on search engines sites such as yahoo, Google and live.com which are used to identify potential candidates with the required position requirements, for example,monster.com, looking in the database for candidates still using the keywords that relate to the position requirements and finally networking with other individuals in uncovering candidates using the social networking sites and tools. Examples of what sourcing is not includes the following, reviewing of candidates who have earlier applied for the advertised positions through the corporate website, processing of a referral by an employee ,corporate recruiting that is receiving candidates from other agencies or screening candidates. Sourcing ensures that only qualified people apply for the job advertised. This saves the time for going through large piles of documents from the candidates who don't qualify for the job advertised. Selection means looking for skills such as typing, communication and also computer skills. Resumes, job applications, educational or professional experience, interviews, testimony of references are used to determine qualifications. Other methods of qualification determination include software knowledge, numeracy, and literacy through employment tests or psychological tests. The most popular selection methods include carrying out interviews,tests,background investigations and application evaluation. This are done through assessment which involves the process of documenting in most cases in measurable terms such as skills, attitude, beliefs and knowledge. According to Watson (1994) assessment can either be subjective or objective. Objective assessment involves some form of tests which have single but correct answers. On the other hand subjective questioning involves carrying out of interviews in order to single out a candidate who has the right information that relates to the advertised vacancy. Selection ensures the best candidate for the job out of many is selected through elimination procedures. On boarding is the introduction that is done to the employees to help them be fully operational within the shortest time possible and this is often integrated in the process of recruitment. The recruitment process relies mostly on skills, education and experiences of the individuals who are to be recruited, for example, the figure below shows where recruitment falls in the department of human resources in the planning process. Planning Forecasting Setting of goals and objectives Analysis of the job Descriptions of the job Specifications of the job Recruitment From the above tree diagram it can be observed that the process of recruitment comes at the end after several other factors are gone through. This aims at getting the best person suited for the advertised position. Procedures should be specified during recruitment and they should be developed into a written policy. This written policy helps save one especially when it comes to discrimination suits filed by an employee. In several organizations the department that needs to fill a vacant position always issue hiring requisition to the department of human resource which indicates that the position actually needs to be filled. The job specifications and descriptions are clearly reviewed by the human resource manager in order to ensure that there is accuracy. After he or she gains understanding and full knowledge of what the ob entails then the process of recruitment takes place. But the various specifics of the process do vary from one company to the other, for example, as a manager in the human resource department you can determine the existence of the job vacancy in the organization and go ahead with the recruitment process. in some organizations departments submits vacancies to the human resource department who goes forward in initiating and coordinating the process of selection ,for example, in the service and food industry the human resource manager has the responsibilities of being closely involved in the recruiting of new employees. The key word that is used and followed during recruitment is qualifications. This key word enables anybody conducting the recruitment process not to deviate into other factors that might cause him/her recruit an un-qualified person, for example, a male human resource manager may likely be attracted to a female candidate thus confirming her as the best candidate. This compromise the qualifications required for the job and do not meet the criteria for recruitment. There are various methods of recruitment which can either be internal or external. According to Bach (2000) internal recruitment is doing promotion from within an organization. It brings with it numerous advantages than bringing new people from outside the organization. This is because the internal people are very familiar with the organizational culture and operations which reduces the much time spend in orienting, familiarizing and integrating new employees into the culture of an organization they have never been before. A job applicant is required to be conversant with the company’s procedures, operations, design and layout and also the operating policies. The above knowledge puts an applicant ahead of others. Most companies find these items in the pipeline of internal candidates and they therefore prefer to carry out internal recruitment rather than external recruitment. Internal recruitment helps get the right person for the job because with the above skills in the mind the candidate has almost half of the required information for the advertised position. External recruitment entails the recruitment of employees from external sources rather than from within the organization. A number of companies do practice this method of recruitment especially when they want to get a new breed of employees who come with new and fresh ideas, new levels of expectations and desires to perform highly in order to create a name for themselves. In spite of this the company has to incur extra costs in orientation, familiarizing and trying to integrate the new employees in the organizational culture . External recruitment helps get the right person for the job because unlike in the internal recruitment where the internal candidate might only have information about the company and limited knowledge pertaining the advertised position,external candidates only apply for the position advertised when they know they are qualified for the job. Conclusion Human resource leans heavily on several theories of motivation and commitment and many other ideas which are derived from organizational behavior field. The focus on individual worker, careful selection and goals and also training are all scientific management procedures that are followed and applied by the human resource departments. Theoretically the human resource has to pass a candidate through several procedures outlined above in order to get the right person for a job. In the real world nepotism,tribalism and favoritism has been used in many companies and organizations especially when it comes to appointments. Job advertisement is done as a formality but real recruitment is done behind the doors. Reference Bach, S. et al. (2000). Personnel management (Blackwell: Oxford press) Back, S. (2005).Managing the human resource,(Blackwell: Oxford press) Blyton, P. et al (1992). Reassessing Human Resource management and recruitment, (London: Sage publishers) Callaghan, G. et al (2002). We recruit attitude, (Journal of management studies) Legge, K. (2000). Human resource management, (Oxford: Oxford Press) Legge, K. (1992). Human resource management, (Palgrave: Basystoke) Storey, J (2001). Human resource management (London: Oxford Press) Watson, T. (1994).Recruitment and selection, (K eds publishers) Read More