Human Resources: Recruitment and Selection - Essay Example

Recruitment & Selection Human Resources are viewed as passive, to be provided and deployed as numbers and skills at the right price, rather than the source of creative energy. Employees are proactive rather than passive inputs into productive processes, capable of development, worthy of trust and collaboration, which is achieved through participation (Legge, 2004). According to Storey (2001) change in the employer led initiatives and the extent to which these initiatives have a strategic character and the degree to which the combination of initiative amount to a quality shift in the approach to the management of labour. Much of the important work on the relative merits of employment structures has evolved through the debate in the industrial sociology/industrial relations and HRM literatures on the ‘flexible firm’. Several dimensions of flexibility have been identified (Blyton and Turnbull, 1998). Effective recruitment and selection are critical to organizational success. They enable companies to have high-performing employees who are also satisfied with their jobs, thus contributing positively to the firm’s bottom line. On the contrary, poor recruitment and selection often result in mismatches which can have negative consequences for an organization. A misfit who is not in tune with the organization’s philosophies and goals can damage production, customer satisfaction, and relationship with suppliers and the overall quality of work. He can also adversely affect the morale and commitment of co-workers and negate efforts to foster team work. Training your way out of a wrong hire can be very expensive. Effective recruitment and selection are therefore not only the first step towards organizational excellence, but are important cost control mechanisms as well. Although HR managers may be responsible for designing employees’ recruitment and selection systems in many firms, all managers need to understand and use these systems. After all attracting and hiring the right kind and level of talent are critical elements of business effectiveness. Stocking a company with top talent has been described as the single most important job of management (Hand, 2002). Managers being an in charge of recruiting or have a key role in the process, if they do not attract and hire the right people it can hurt the organization. Once the firm has determined its staffing needs, it needs to hire the best employees to fill the available position. The hiring process has three components: recruitment, selection and socialization Recruitment is the process of generating a pool of qualified candidates for a particular job. The firm must announce the job’s availability to the market and attract qualified candidates to apply. The firm may seek applicants from inside the organization, outside the organization, or both. Selection is the process of making a “hire or no hire” decision regarding each applicant for a job. The process typically involves determining the characteristics required for effective job performance and then measuring applicants for those characteristics. Now most people would agree that the best qualified candidates should be hired and promoted. In the long run, hiring the best candidates makes a tremendous contribution to the firm’s performance. It has been estimated that above average employees are worth about 40% of their salary more to the organization than average employees (Cardy and Carson, 1996). Conversely if the organizations do poor hiring decisions, it may likely to cause problem from day one. Unqualified or unmotivated workers will probably require closer supervision and direction. They may require additional training yet never reach the required level of performance. They may also give customers inaccurate information or give customer a reason to do business with competitors. Recruitment represents the first contact that a company makes with potential employees. It is through recruitment that many individuals will come to know a company and eventually decide whether they wish to work for it. A well planned and well managed recruiting effort will result in high quality applicants, whereas a haphazard and piecemeal effort will result in mediocre ones. High quality employees cannot be selected when better candidates do not know the job openings, are not interested in working for the company and do not apply (Stoops, 1982). The recruitment process should inform qualified individuals about employment opportunities, create a positive image of the company, provide enough information about the jobs so that applicants can make comparisons with their qualifications and interests, and generate enthusiasm among the best candidates so that they will apply for the vacant positions. Recruitment tends itself as a potential source of competitive advantage to a firm. An effective approach to recruitment can help a company successfully compete for limited human resources. The firm must choose a recruiting approach that produces the best pool of candidates quickly and cist effectively. A recruitment programme helps the firm at least four ways: Attract highly qualified and competent people; ensure that the selected candidates stay longer with the company: Make sure that there is match between cost and benefits; Help the firm create more culturally diverse workforce. The negative consequence of a poor recruitment process speaks volumes about its role in an organization. The failure to generate an adequate number of reasonably qualified applicants can prove costly in several ways. It can greatly complicate the selection process and may result in lowering of selection standards. The poor quality of selection means extra cost on training and supervision. Furthermore, when recruitment fails to meet organizational needs for talent, a typical response is to raise entry-level pay scales. This can distort traditional wage and salary relationships in the organization, resulting in unavoidable consequences (Heneman III et al., 1986). Thus the effectiveness of the recruitment process can play a major role in determining the resources that must be expanded on other HR activities and their ultimate success. Now given the pool of candidates that results from recruitment efforts, selection is the mechanism that determines the overall quality of organizations human resources. To understand the impact of selection practices, consider what happens when the wrong person is hired or promoted. Hiring the wrong person can also cause friction among staff as other workers become resentful of having to pick up the stack for inept employees. Inappropriate hires may even lead better employees to seek employment elsewhere. All these effects have economic ramifications. In fact economic value of good selection procedures is higher than most people realize (Hunter & Hunter, 1984). Recruitment and selection are the two crucial steps in the HR process and are often used interchangeably. There is, however, affine distinction between the two steps, while recruitment refers to the process of identifying and encouraging prospective employees to apply for jobs selection is concerned with picking the right candidates from the pool of applicants. Recruitment is said to be positive in its approach as it seeks to attract as many candidates as possible. Selection on the other hand, is negative in its application in as much as it seeks to eliminate as many unqualified applicants as possible in order to identify the right candidates. The role of selection in an organization’s effectiveness is crucial for at least two reasons. First, work performance depends on individuals. The best way to improve performance is to hire people who have the competence and the willingness to work. Arguing from the employee’s view point, poor or inappropriate choice can be demoralizing to the individual concerned (who finds himself or herself in the wrong job) and demotivating for the rest of the workforce. Effective selection therefore assumes greater relevance. Second, cost incurred in recruiting and hiring personnel speaks volumes about the role of selection. The cost of selection and training of top level executive may run into thousands of dollars. Costs of wrong selection are much greater. Figure-1 Success False Negative Error True positive (High Hit) Failure True Negative (Low Hit) False positive error Failure Predicted Success Predicted Outcomes of the Selection Decision Adopted from Thomas H. Stone, understanding personnel management, CBS College Publishing, 1989, p. 175. Figure-I shows four possible outcomes of a selection decisions. Two of these-true positive (high hits) and true negative (low hit) are right selection decisions. The other two outcomes represent selection errors. In the false positive error, a decision is made to hire an applicant based on predicted success, but failure results. In false negative error an applicant who would have succeeded is rejected based on predictions of failure. In either case, selectors will have erred. They may remember that the selection successes will be written in sand and failures in stone. An organization with a false positive error incurs three types of costs. The first type is incurred while the person is employed. This can be the result of production and profit losses, damaged company reputation, accident due to negligence, absenteeism and the like. The second type of costs is associated with training transfer or terminating the services of the employee. Cost of replacing an employee with a fresh one, cost of hiring, training and replacement constitute the third type of costs. Generally the more important the job, the greater is the cost of the selection error. In the case of false negative error, an applicant who would have succeeded is rejected because of predicted failure. Most false negative error go unnoticed except when the applicant belongs to a reserve category and files a discrimination charge. Costs associated with this type of error are generally difficult to estimate. So it is necessary that a careful selection has to be made which help an organization to avoid costs associated with both false positive error as well as false negative error. Now looking at the negative aspects of wrong hiring most of the companies have adopted different approaches to recruit and select an employee according to their specific requirement. One of such organization is South West Airlines. A SW airline is one of the most successful low cost airlines operating base in USA. Its CEO Kelleher has once remarked” We look for attitudes; people with sense of humor who do not take themselves too seriously. We will train you on whatever it is you have to do but the one thing Southwest cannot change in people inherent attitude. Although each department has a unique hiring process, there are one fundamental principle-hire people with right spirit. We look for people with other oriented outgoing personalities, individuals who become part of an extended family of people who work hard and have fun at the same time” (Freiberg & Freiberg, 1996). South West airlines explicitly look for people who would be team players. Basically due to best policies for recruitment and selection SW airlines have minimum turnover rate as well as retention of employee is higher than any other low cost airlines. In a similar fashion another major company Dell, perfect to recruit people with an inquisitive nature and a willingness to learn. The company looked for the people who had a healthy blend of experience and intellect; people who were not afraid of making mistake while attempting to innovate and who had the capability to look at problems from various angles and come up with solutions. Dell checked whether job applicants would be compatible with its values and beliefs. During interviews candidates were asked to describe something they did that they were particularly proud of. The answer gave clues whether they worked for the company or for themselves. Officials would make it a point to disagree with the candidates to test their conviction. Dell recruited people who had self confidence at the same time. Dell preferred people who did not mind if someone disagree with them in public or were corrected when they were wrong (Kasturi, and Bell, 2002). In most of the innovative companies like 3M, they focus on selection of the person having more wisdom than knowledge. Companies need persons having out of the box thinking, to generate new ideas. Nowadays the phrase “talent management” is used to describe literally everything that happens under the broad umbrella of HR. It does have a core meaning however: anticipating human capital needs and setting about meeting them. “Getting the right people with right skills into the right time” is a common description of the end result of a good talent management outcome. The problem we are hoping to avoid with good talent management is to avoid talent crunches where business growth suffers because we cannot find employees with the right competencies to get the work done, and talent surpluses, where we have to layoff and restructure. Talent management is at the top of the HR agenda because it is at the top of the CEO and executives list of concerns. For example, Mckinsey interviewed CEO’s and other business leaders around the word and found help worrying that their talent management practices were not aligned with business outcomes. The big challenge for talent management stems from the main challenge facing contemporary business and that is to manage uncertainty. The demand for talent is uncertain. Relying entirely on Just-in-time workforce based in outside hiring cannot work. Relying on traditional models of internal development based in long term forecast cannot work either as they are too expensive and too unpredictable. As we have already seen in the field of business strategy, the answer is going to point us away from planning and towards adaptability and responsiveness as a means for addressing uncertainty on both supply and demand sides of the talent management equation. References: 1. Blyton, P. and Turnbull, P. (1998), The Dynamics of Employee Relations. London: Macmillan. 2. Cardy, R. L. and Carson, K.P. (1996), Total quality and the abandonment of performance appraisal, Taking a good thing too far? Journal of quality management, 1, 193-206. 3. Freiberg, Kevin & Freiberg Jackie, (1996), Nuts! Southwest Airlines Crazy Recipe for business and personal success, Brad Press Inc. Texas. 4. Hand, T (2002), Choosing the right recruiter, Network World, 19, 41. 5. Stoops, Rick (1982), Recruiting as a sales function, personnel Journal, December P.890. 6. Herbert G. Heneman III et al., (1986), Personnel/Human resource Management, third Edition, Irwin, Pp.224 7. Hunter J.E & Hunter R.F., (1984), Validity and utility of alternatives predictors of job performance, psychological Bulletin, 96, 72-98. 8. Kasturi, Rangan V. and Marie, Bell, (2002), Dell-New Horizons, Harvard business school case, 9-502-522, Oct. 9. Legge, K. (2004) Human Resource Management: Rhetorics and Realities, Palgrave, Basingstoke. 10. Stone, Thomas H. (1989), Understanding personnel management, CBS College Publishing, p. 175. 11. Storey, J. (ed) (2001), Human Resource Management: A Critical Text 2nd edition, Thompson Learning, London. Read More