The Recruitment and Selection Process în Human Resource Management

An Introduction

‘If you don’t recruit and select great people, you won’t have great employees. And without great employees you won’t have a great company’ (Sullivan in Alan Price, 1997: 128).

Finding the right person for the job has always been important and the decision to appoint an individual is one of the most crucial an employer will ever take. The recruitment and selection process is concerned with identifying, attracting and choosing suitable people to meet an organisation’s human resource requirements. They are integrated activities and ‘where recruitment stops and selection begins is a moot point’. Recruitment is often distinguished from selection by the claim that ‘recruitment is a positive act, that is, it is attempting to attract a pool of suitable candidates for a position’, whilst ‘selection is a negative process, that is reducing the likely candidates down to the number that are to be successful’(Bolton, 1997: 32). So a useful definition of recruitment is ‘searching for and obtaining potential job candidates in sufficient numbers and quality so that the organisation can select the most appropriate people to fill its job needs’ (Dowling and Shuler in I. Beardwell and L. Holden, 1997: 212); whereas selection is more concerned with ‘predicting which candidates will make the most appropriate contribution to the organisation – now and in the future’ (Hacket in I. Beardwell and L. Holden, 1997: 212).

G. A. Cole (1993: 128) gives another definition to recruitment and selection: ‘the principal purpose of recruitment activities is to attract sufficient and suitable potential employees to apply for vacancies in the organisation. The principal purpose of selection activities, by comparison, is to identify the most suitable applicants and persuade them to accept a position in the organisation’.

Recruitment is a term applied to the process by which suitable people are identified and allocated to work tasks. It is a function of crucial importance for effective human resource management. Yet, the way resourcing is conducting varies considerably from one organisation to another. In fact, there is no right way to set about employment resourcing – it depends on circumstances and the context of the organisation involved.

Employees are expensive assets to acquire but many businesses approach resourcing in a relatively unstructured manner. However, other employees use sophisticated methods with long-term objectives in mind, often attempting to balance considerations such as: satisfying the immediate need to minimise employee costs while maximising worker contribution to the organisation, fulfilling a long-term aim of obtaining the optimal mix of skills and commitment in the workforce.

At he heart of the cost-efficient resourcing process lies the need to identify work that must be done and the knowledge, skills and abilities required to do it. But it is not sufficient to deal with individual jobs: there are strategic implications to consider. Employers must make choices between hiring permanent employees and using contingent employees or subcontractors. Many businesses outsource non-core activities such as computer support, payroll, catering and cleaning to specialist providers.

In the past, selection has been about matching people to clearly defined jobs. In the twenty-first century, the emphasis is likely to be on wider criteria aimed at identifying flexible people able to fulfil multi-skilled roles. Selectors need a broad gasp of human resource strategy to make such choices. They need to understand the direction in which an organisation is intending to go and the kind of people who are needed over the medium to long-term. Human resource specialists have a high profile role in the selection process. Getting it wrong can have damaging consequences on their status and career and this has implications for the quality of their decision-making.

Selection procedures are costly, but the consequences of choosing unsuitable recruits can be even more costly. Selection is time-consuming and often involves senior staff. Large organisations increasingly use sophisticated tests and computerised packages, which are expensive to buy and require proper training to administer. At face value these procedures may appear to be objective; however, there are underlying issues of validity, reliability, fairness and equality of opportunity.

The recruitment and selection process must be as efficient as possible. It is always expensive and not always easy to rectify mistakes in selection. Often the organisation lives on with the consequences of poor selection for years ahead. If recruits are not the best available, it follows also that money spent on training is likely to be wasted. Finally, the poor performer has an adverse effect on others, leading to a decline in morale. Therefore, time spent on setting up and monitoring the best possible recruitment and selection procedures is time well spent.

The paper describes the essential elements of the recruitment and selection process. It contains both a theoretical part and a case study, where the theory is applied to real life situations.

The theoretical part is structured in three chapters. The first chapter begins by examining the human resource plan and how authorisation is given for starting a recruitment and selection procedure. The effectiveness of job descriptions and person specification is then compiled. The second chapter deals with how candidates are attracted, what recruitment methods can be used and how an effective job advertisement is written. The third chapter begins with a description of the selection methods like application forms, CVs, biodata, interviews, tests, references, graphology, assessment centres pointing out their advantages and disadvantages. The chapter ends with the decision-making procedures and the evaluation of selection methods.

The case study is an example of how an organisation, Delta Motors SRL, organises the recruitment and selection process for the Sales Representative position.

The purpose of the case study is to provide a practical example for the theory and to illustrate what kinds of recruitment and selection methods are used by this particular organisation in order to achieve great results.