Recruitment and Selection Definitions

Recruitment

- searching for and attracting candidates - external or internal - for job vacancies. New people are found and brought into the organisation. This involves communicating with actual or potential job seekers, motivating them to apply and persuading candidates that they really want to come and work for the firm. The objectives are to attract candidates of the right quality in the right number.

Competition and inertia exist in a labour market. Many candidates must decide to leave their present job, the best may not be looking for a job change. With high employment (labour shortage), good candidates may be scarce. Conversely where there is high employment, some good candidates may be reluctant to move from the-situation-they-know into the-situation-they don't-know.

Recruitment occurs across all occupations from school and college leavers to the unskilled and semi-skilled, to technologically-oriented staff and successful senior managers. The police service, forces and even judiciary have recruitment problems and systems.

Recruitment activity has an element of

 

• public relations about it. The organisation opens its doors to job seekers and hence the outside world. Certain organisation development, marketing, promotional and quality aspects take recruitment activity beyond being just a maintenance process. Strategic policy questions are raised. The organisation in communicating to recruiots and potential recruits wishes to present itself in the best possible light - as a virtuous, successful ,worthy organisation.

   

• culture maintenance and power about it. The processes of recruitment are enacted by the powerful. Gate keepers to the organisation select those they feel will not only be competent but who are acceptable to the organisation - according to criteria which are variously defined. They may recruit according to

   

  • some iconic vision of an "ideal type" for the organisation today.
  • their own preferences and desires. This could be called a "doppleganger effect" .... they recruit in their own mirror image, with a slight 'phase' difference but nonetheless as a clone or doppleganger.
  • some notion of proper and perhaps ethically guided belief.

   

  Selection

  - a latter stage of recruitment. It involves choosing

   

  • competent and qualified applicants suited to the job.
  • new members of the organisation

  We can focus on

   

  • selection methods and skills in terms of contribution to the reliability of decisions made.
  • The criteria defined and applied (explicitly and implicitly) by decision-makers and how these reflect their comprehension of "necessary competence".
  • How the selection processes encompass the assumptions and commitments, the generalities, truths and confusions - of decision-makers about the imperatives of organisation culture and who they seek to maintain and change this.

    Thank-you for offering me the job but - No.

    Remember too that job candidates "select" the organisation. Some candidates can afford to turn away and say "this organisation is not for me".

     

    Selection Methods

    The prescriptions, the "how-to do-its" of selection, are problem-solving strategies (heuristics of general and specific scope) which, taken as a cocktail, may narrow down the selection decision and increase the chances of choosing the "right" candidate although probably "best available" is a better term.

    Selection methods range across

     

    • interviews - the most popular and hence the skills of interviewing are important
    • references
    • analysis of candidate career/life data
    • evaluation of candidate behaviour/ performance in group activities
    • work attachments/experience (trial periods)
    • skill testing with task/work simulations e.g. typing, computer programming, brick-laying and candidates making presentations etc
    • knowledge, aptitude and psycho-metric tests of various facets of know-how, intelligence and personality
    • graphology !!!!

    Selection is a social, interactive activity and skill development and the textbooks recommend the use of structured and tested methods to secure objectivity, reliability and reduced risk and uncertainty.

    Assumptions and Recipes

    Recruitment and selection - from a sociological perspective - are mechanisms of organisational maintenance and modification. The assumptions behind such modification need to be considered as well as the recipes.

     

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    BOLA is developed and maintained by Chris Jarvis