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Human Resources Chapter 5: Recruitment and Selection

The HR Recruitment Process


The role of HR recruitment is to build a supply of potential new hires that the organization can
draw on if the need arises.
Human Resource Recruitment is any practice or activity carried on by the organization with
the primary purpose of identifying and attracting potential employees.
Recruitment activities are designed to affect: 1) the number of people who apply for vacancies,
2) the type of people who apply for them, and/or 3) the likelihood that those applying for
vacancies will accept positions if offered.
All companies have to make decisions in three areas of recruiting: 1) personnel policies, which
affect the kinds of jobs the company has to offer, 2) recruitment sources used to solicit
applicants, which affect the kinds of people who apply and 3) the characteristics and behaviors of
the recruiter.
Human resource policies (aka personnel policies) is a generic term used to refer to organizational
decisions that affect the nature of the vacancies for which people are recruited. The
characteristics of the vacancy are more important than recruiters or recruiting sources when it
comes to predicting job choice decisions.
Internal Vs. External Recruiting: Job Security
Promotes within
Extrinsic and Intrinsic Rewards
Companies that take a lead-the-market approach to pay a policy of paying higher than
current market wages have a distinct advantage in recruiting.
Employer Branding
It is important for companies in highly competitive labor markets.
Organizations need to take three important steps to build an employment brand: 1) define the
target audience, 2) develop a set of reason why the organization is more attractive to that
audience than other organizations, and 3) incorporate those reasons into all recruitment efforts
and the organizations career website.
Recruitment Sources
Internal Vs. External Sources
Relying on internal sources offers a company several advantages: it generates a sample of
applicants who are well known to the firm, these applicants are relatively knowledgeable about
the companys vacancies, and it generally is cheaper and faster to fill vacancies internally.
However, bringing in outsiders may expose the organization to new ideas or new ways of doing
business.
Direct Applicants and Referrals
Direct applicants are people who apply for a vacancy without prompting from the organization.

Referrals are people who are prompted to apply by someone within the organization.
Many direct applicants are to some extent already sold on the organization. They have done
homework about the company, self-selection.
In the war for talent, some employers that try to entice one new employee from a competitor will
often try to leverage that one person to try to entice even more people away. The term lift-out
has been coined for this practice of trying to recruit a whole team of people
Advertisements in Newspapers and Periodicals
The classified section of local newspapers is a commonly used medium.
Electronic Recruiting
Public and Private Employment Agencies
Human Resources and Skills Development Canada (HRSDC) helps unemployed Canadians find
work through its online Job Bank, located on the Service Canada website. It is a free public
service allowing employers and job seekers to connect online.
Public employment agencies such as the HRSDCs Job Bank serve primarily the blue0collar
labor market; private employment agencies perform much the same service for the white-collar
labor market. However, private charge the organization for the referrals.
One type of private employment agency is the executive search firm (ESF). These agencies are
often referred to as headhunters.
Colleges and Universities
Evaluating the Quality of a Source
Yield ratios express the percentage of applicants who successfully move from one stage of the
recruitment and selection process to the next.
Recruiters
The recruiter often gets involved late in the process. Recruiters characteristics and behaviors
seem to have less impact on applicants job choices than we might expect.
Recruiters Functional Area Some studies indicate that applicants find a job less attractive and
the recruiter less credible when he is an HRM specialist.
Recruiters Traits Two traits stand out when applicants reactions to recruiters are examined
warmth and informativeness.
Recruiters Realism
Enhancing Recruiter Impact Recruiters do not have much influence on job choice, but they can
have an impact. Recruiters can provide timely feedback. Recruiting can be done in teams rather
than by individuals.
The Selection Process
The recruitment process is complete once an adequate pool of qualified candidates have applied
for the organizations vacant position(s).
Selection is the process by which an organization attempts to identify applicants with the
necessary knowledge, skills, abilities and other characteristics that will help it achieve its goals.

Selection Method Standards


Several generic standards should be met in any selection process. We focus on 5: Reliability,
Validity, Generalizability, Utility and Legality.
Reliability
Reliability the degree to which a performance measure is free from random error. The
consistency of a performance measure.
It refers to the measuring instrument (a ruler versus a visual guess) rather than to the
characteristic itself.
Validity
Validity is the extent to which a performance measure is related to performance on the job. A
measure must be reliable if it is to have any validity.
Criterion-Related Validity is a method of establishing the validity of a personnel selection
method by showing a substantial correlation between test scores and job performance scores.
Criterion-related validity studies come in two varieties.
Predictive Validation is a study that seeks to establish an empirical relationship between
applicants test scores and their eventual performance on the job.
Concurrent Validation is a study in which a test is administered to all the people currently in a
job and then incumbents scores are correlated with existing measures of their performance on
the job.
Despite the extra effort and time needed for predictive validation, it is superior to concurrent
validation for a number of reasons. Job applicants are typically more motivated to perform well
on the tests than are current employees. Current employees have learned many things on the job
that job applicants have not yet learned. Current employees tend to be homogeneous they are
similar to each other on many characteristics.
Content Validation is a test-validation strategy performed by demonstrating that the items,
questions or problems posed by a test are a representative sample of the kinds of situations or
problems that occur on the job.
Criterion-related validity is established by empirical means, content validity is achieved
primarily through a process of expert judgment.
Content validation has two limitations, one assumption behind content validation is that the
person who is to be hired must have the knowledge, skills or abilities at the time she is hired.
Second, because subjective judgment plays such a large role in content validation, it is critical to
minimize the amount of inference involved on the part of judges.
Generalizability
Generalizability is the degree to which the validity of a selection method established in one
context extends to other contexts.
There are 3 primary contexts over which we might like to generalize: different situations,
different samples of people and different time periods.
Utility
Utility is the degree to which the information provided by selection methods enhances the
effectiveness of selecting personnel in real organizations.

Types of Selection Methods


Interviews
A selection interview has been defined as a dialogue initiated by one or more persons to gather
information and evaluate the qualifications of an applicant for employment. It is the most
widespread selection method employed in organizations.
However, without proper care, it can be unreliable, low in validity, and biased against a number
of different groups. They can also be costly.
To increase the utility of the personnel selection interview, HR staff should keep the interview
structured, standardized and focused on accomplishing a small number of goals.
Two types of interview questions commonly used are behavioral description interview questions
and situational interview questions.
Behavioral description interviews (BDI) are structured interviews posing open-ended,
experience-based questions that focus on what the applicant has done in the past, in an attempt to
predict future behavior.
Situation interview is a procedure where applicants are confronted with specific future-based
issues, questions or problems that are likely to arise on the job.
Research suggests that it is best to ask interviewers to be witnesses of facts that can later be
integrated via objective formulas, as opposed to being judges.
Reference Checking, Biographical Data and Application Blanks
Physical Ability Tests
There are seven classes of tests in this areas: 1) muscular tension, 2) muscular power, 3)
muscular endurance, 4) cardiovascular endurance, 5) flexibility 6) balance and 7) coordination.
Cognitive Ability Tests
Cognitive ability tests are tests that include three dimensions: verbal comprehension,
quantitative ability and reasoning ability.
Verbal comprehension is a persons capacity to understand and use written and spoken
language.
Quantitative ability is the speed and accuracy with which one can solve arithmetic problems of
all kinds.
Reasoning ability is a persons capacity to invent solution to many diverse problems.
Personality Inventories
Personality measures tend to categorize individuals by what they are like. There are 5 major
dimensions of personality: 1) extroversion, 2) adjustment, 3) agreeableness, 4) conscientiousness
and 5) inquisitiveness.
Emotional intelligence is traditionally conceived of having 5 aspects. 1) self awareness, 2) selfregulation, 3) self-motivation 4) empathy, and 5)social skills.
The validity for almost all of the big five factors in terms of predicting job performance also
seems to be higher when the scores are not obtained from the applicant but are instead taken
from other people.

Work-Sample Tests
Work-sample tests attempt to simulate the job in a pre-hiring context to observe how the
applicant performs in the simulated job.
Drawbacks are that they are job specific, so generalizability is low. They are relatively
expensive.
Assessment center is a process in which multiple raters evaluate employees performance on a
number of exercise.
Their criterion-related validity tends to be quite high.
Problem-solving ability stands out as probably the most important skill determined via this
method.
Honesty Tests and Drug Tests
Paper and pencil honesty testing was born from the ban of lie detector tests in interviews.
4 reasons why companies still try to use drug testing in Canada: 1) screening of job applicants
for ingestion of illegal drugs, as a condition of employment, 2) to see if impairment was the
cause of an accident near miss, or as a condition of return to work if prior history exists and the
employee is in a safety-sensitive position, 3) testing employees whose on-the-job performance is
suffering, if drug abuse is suspected to be the reason for poor job behaviors and 4) random drug
testing.
Compliance with the Law During Recruitment and Selection
There are at least 4 issues employers must pay attention to: 1) preventing discrimination against
applicants, 2) respecting the privacy of applicants, 3) increasing accessibility to the position for
all potential applicants and accommodating individuals with disabilities and 4) communicating
hiring agreements clearly.
To prevent problems, companies are well advised to be as inclusive as possible, and to extend
respect to applicants in every way, including:
1. Recruiting: Advertise job vacancies widely, using a variety of methods, in order to attract
a diverse number and type of applicants.
2. Selection: Train interviewers in advance to use valid and reliable interview questions.
3. Selection: Use only reliable and valid selection applicant testing methods
4. Selection: Respect applicants human rights and right to privacy
5. Selection: Manage risk Clarify the terms of an offer of employment in a confirmation
letter to the new employee.

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