Recruitment + Selection (Wilkinson & Redman 2013)

Recruitment + Selection (Wilkinson & Redman 2013)

1. External Factors

   • Since the 2008 financial crisis there has been an increase in zero hours, temporary and part-time contracts throughout Europe
   • A slow ‘loose’ job market creates a relative oversupply of job applicants. This allows organizations easier access to appropriate supplies of skill, and greater power to hold salaries constant and become more selective when hiring = less bargaining power for applicants
   • The wider economy exerts a positive or negative effect on hiring activity through job growth and contraction
   • Skill supply is also affected by levels of educational attainment; more graduates are being produced than ever before in the UK = many graduates 22% are over qualified for their jobs
   • There has been an increase in vacancies that employers report as being hard to fill because applicants with the correct skills cannot be identified (skill shortages)
   • Global issues such as immigration and an ageing population and more women seeking employment mean a far more diverse workforce
   • Another trend is the changing priorities of job candidates and what attracts them to jobs and organizations e.g. work location (47% important), holiday entitlement (43%), flexible working and bonuses (39%), company workplace culture and environment (38%)
   • The growing concern for work-life balance and flexibility has been popularly linked to the working preferences of the Generation Y / Millennials born between 1980 and 2000
   • Must comply with EU and national labor laws
   • The general principle of equality in recruiting applied both to direct and indirect discrimination e.g. recruiting through events targeted exclusively at all boys’ schools would indirectly discriminate against women
   • Positive discrimination: making hiring decisions controversial because of its acceptance of quota systems to redress existing discrimination. Positive discrimination is illegal in the UK but allowed in some countries to redress serious historical imbalances e.g. South Africa

2. Large organizations are more likely to have dedicated HR staff / function for recruitment

3. Smaller organizations tend to rely on less bureaucratic and formal methods of recruitment such as WOM, referrals or networking. This can lead to several problems such as restricting the potential supply of qualified recruits and or reliance on unsuitable candidates, simply because they are convenient. This can cause higher turnover due to disillusionment with the job. Such a restricted pool could also be seen as discriminatory and illegal

4. Recruitment is often outsourced as an attempt to reduce costs while at the same time obtaining high quality applicants

5. Pre-recruitment activities

   • Job descriptions
     • Through job analysis
     • Campion’s (1998) multidimensional model of job analysis and design attempted to draw together many approaches to job analysis to provide the most comprehensive description possible of what a job entails. This proposed that jobs should be described using all of the following dimensions: tasks, worker characteristics (knowledge, skills, abilities, personality, motivation, perceptual-motor requirements), job context (tools/equipment, degree of social interaction), the reward structure, and job demands (problem solving, intensity, speed)
   • The exact nature of the person specifications has been influenced greatly by competency profiling. This identifies the worker-based attributes (knowledge, skill, ability, personality) that are required to reach a required level of performance (or competence). The difference between this and traditional approaches is that the emphasis is on observable behaviors. Competency profiling emerged from the work of McClelland (1976) and Boyatzis (1982)

6. Recruitment methods

   • Agencies and Headhunters (49%)
   • Internet (e-recruitment)
     • The most commonly reported benefits of e-recruitment are cost effectiveness, the generation of a larger candidate pool, and ease of use and speed of hiring. The primary drawback is the time taken to filter out large numbers of unsuitable applicants; other problems include that certain applicant groups may not be reached and the impersonal nature of e-recruitment.
     • There are concerns about the accessibility for some groups such as the unemployed, less IT-literate and older applicants. E-recruitment may not be fully compliant with disability discrimination legislation. Organizations should thus use a multitude of channels, both traditional and modern
   • Social Networking Sites (LinkedIn)

7. Employer branding: taking the applicant perspective further, there has been a surge of interest in the image of the employer and, in particular, ‘branding’ as a competitive attraction strategy

   • Applicant attraction to organization implies getting applicants to view the organization as a positive place to work.

8. The ‘war for talent’, when demand for applicants exceeds supply

9. There is no ‘best practice’ recruitment approach, although methods must comply with equality legislation