RECRUITMENT AND SELECTIONIn today’s competitive scenario, when employees are becoming increasingly knowledgeable and mobile, the challenge lies in attracting the best man power. Recruiting and selecting the right candidate, keep in mind the overall vision, strategy and broad, environmental context of the organization, is increasingly gaining ground.

Definition of Recruitment and Selection

Recruitment encompasses all organizational practices and decision that affect either the number or type of individual who are willing to apply for, or to accept a given vacancy. The focus of recruitment and selection is on matching the capabilities and inclination of prospective candidates against the demand and rewards inherent in a given job. Recruitment and selection lie at the heart of how businesses procure human resources required to maintain a suitable competitive advantage over its competitor.

The recruitment process

Job analysis

The recruitment process starts with job analysis. This job analysis is essential in order to gather all relevant information about the job demands and to set the hiring standards. In order to carry out a proper job analysis a carefully planned internal communication is needed.

Recruitment decision

The second component concerns the recruitment strategy, the strategy to spread all relevant information among the possible set of candidates. There are three broad considerations under recruitment,

1. Time to recruit

2. Sourcing decision ( where from to recruit ) and,

3. Channel or medium through which to attract potential candidates.

1.Time to recruit :-

While recruitment can happen at any point of time in an organization’s life, it might vary depending on the life cycle and size of the organization. It also depends on the number of existing employees the firm has and the quality of employees to meet current and future challenges.

Number of people to recruit

Number of employees to recruit would vary according to the organizational structure, if the organization has elaborate hierarchical structure, and the existing skill set doesn’t suffice, then organizations might recruit large number of people phase-wise or at a time depending on the org.’s

expansion plan. If the organization has comparatively flat structure, and the existing skill set doesn’t suffice, then organizations might less number of people, taking into consideration the organizational resource constraints.

2. Sourcing Decision

After taking the two important decisions on the quality of people to recruit and the number of people to recruit, comes the important decision about wherefrom to recruit. It is more likely that new entrants are going to recruit people from well-established firms to access tacit business knowledge. Larger organizations have a greater tendency to recruit internally, across all managerial grades, than do their smaller counterparts. This is not surprising since large organization, by virtue of their size, have access to a larger pool of potentially suitable candidates. If suppose the organization is large but it has lost its relevance ( because of technological obsolescence or change in customer’s preferences ) would the org. still rely on its internal knowledge pool to sustain itself. Most likely answer will be negative.

Possible Sources of Recruitment

1. Existing Employees2. Competitor’s Employees3. New people joining the industry

- Campus recruitment- People working in related field, but not directly related to the industry.

On the basis of above argument made above we can make the following proposition:-

Established organization with strong tacit knowledge base would make internal recruitment more often.

New entrants with weak or no tacit knowledge base would involve in external recruitment.

3. Channel or Medium used to attract new employees from outside :--

After taking the decision on whether to recruit internally or use external sources, the next decision is, how to attract and which medium to use for recruiting people. We can think of five possible sources of attracting potential candidates for recruitment, they are :--

Newspaper Magazines Online recruitment Words-of-mouth Recruitment process outsourcing (RPO)

Newspaper

Where stakes for an individual is very high, printed medium of advertisement is more effective than any other medium. Organizations having less knowledge in the existing market would tend to opt for newspaper to elaborately explain who they are and help people make an involved choice by detailing job recruitments, opportunities for growth etc.

Magazine

Given the logic above, well established organizations would use specialized magazines to attract people who are not actively hunting for jobs and carve a niche for themselves. On the other hand, we use of specialized magazine in the case of relatively less-established player would be less, since they first need to build up an awareness of people through the help of mass communication medium, like newspaper and then would tend to convince people of specialized competency to join their organization.

Online Recruitment

The term Online Recruitment (OR), e-cruiting, cybercruiting, or internet recruiting imply the formal sourcing of job information online. The scope of OR is wide open. It can provide information on job vacancies, conduct online interviews, psychometric assessment, electronic mailing list, etc. it provides shorter recruiting cycle and online recruitment reaches a wider range of applicants, thereby giving better quality of response.

Word-of-mouth

Since taking a decision to work for an org. has some amount of risk involved at the juncture of decision-making, hence people would tend to decide on their joining an org. from a reliable network. In this case, friends and relatives’ opinion play a major role. Well established organizations’ major source of recruitment related information is word-of-mouth promotion of the organization through its employees, customers, suppliers, and other stakeholders. For a new entrant or those with less domain knowledge this would be substantially missing.

Recruitment Process Outsourcing

Recruitment process Outsourcing is a form of BPO where an employer outsources or transfer all or part of the staffing process to an external service provider. A true or total RPO solution involves the outsourcing of the entire recruiting function or process to an external service provider. This provider serves to provide the necessary skills, tools, technologies, and activities to serve as their client’s virtual “recruiting department”.

Costs can be reduced because an RPO provider typically provides greater recruiting efficiencies with benchmarks processes and improved sourcing techniques. In addition RPO solutions typically allow for greater fluctuations in volumes and do not require dedicated staff to support a department when volumes are low.

Selection After the recruitment-related decision, perhaps the most important decision is manpower sourcing, the decision to select or reject the candidates. The process of choosing the most suitable candidate for a job from among the available applicants is called selection. The purpose of selection is to screen the applicants’ abilities and traits in order to assess the degree of success and compatibility of the individual in the organization. This is phase of the recruitment strategy where the communication between the employers and job seekers is crucial. Though there are various means of setting selection criteria such as written test, group discussion, psychometric test, video-conferencing with recruitee, yet no formal recruitment cycle can ever be complete without face-to-face discussion between the recruiter and the recruitee.

The only difference of approach between the well established and less established organization is that while taking the decision as to who is the right candidate, well-established organization is going to make an analysis of person-culture fit. For a less-established, the culture is at a nascent stage. Their decision to recruit from outside, show they want to have a higher fit with the environment and hence the emphasis would be on person-outside fit.