Recruitment Practice vs. Theory

Academically, recruitment activity is treated more as experience-based knowledge about practice than as a body of theory.

There is a vacancy; an entirely new job or someone leaves the organisation. We are short of a brain and a pair of hands. It is functionally necessity to fill the post. As to how best to fill the job (decision-making), its demands need to be understood and a skilled, systematic approach is needed for this "personnel" task.

The literature on recruitment tends to give

• more space to selection processes than the wider practices of recruitment (systems & procedures for job definition, advertising, short-listing and overall administration of selection).
• How to do it guidelines (prescriptions) on "best approaches" typically recommend
  • common, logical sequences to follow when recruiting
  • methods for evaluating job requirements
  • skills and understandings associated with processes of selection e.g. for traditional interviews.
  • further methods/techniques for ascertaining candidate suitability. These may even substitute for the interview and include tests of ability, aptitude and intelligence
  • policy frameworks to satisfy the legal side of the recruitment problem

Prescriptions

Guidelines offer sensible pointers on what to do, how to do it, (methods and skills) but be careful. Recruitment and selection work is given a psuedo-science gloss by advice which recommends that its processes and outcomes can be bettered by particular systems, procedures and psychology-derived methods.

A package of "dos and don's" can become too prescriptive. Does all the medicine need to be taken to ensure good health? Maybe like some surgical procedures or medical regimes, some pills have questionable value - yet we still take them as a precaution!

A Systems Approach vs "Be Systematic"

Analysis of the inputs, processes and outputs and environmental contexts of recruitment and selection systems helps us to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the propositions of "take a systematic approach" prescriptions. Generally these prescriptions recommend that

if those doing recruitment and selection take systematic care, use the right methods and apply specific expertise, giving attention to detail, then they will make more reliable selection decisions.

This is sensible enough - but proof is difficult. The aim is to maximise

• the validity of decision making criteria and testing methods
• the reliability (predictability) of methods and decisions with due attention to utility (cost).

However a systems approach requires definition of

• the purposes, elements and relationships of the system under study
• an understanding of the inputs, processing mechanisms and outputs of the system.
• remember that recruitment and selection systems are open systems which interact with its environment (other systems) and thus need to be adaptive. They are subject to human frailty.
• they are alost political, value-based systems

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BOLA is developed and maintained by Chris Jarvis