Recruitment and Selection – Trends and Challenges
Executive Summary
Effective recruitment and selection practices are pivotal factors serving as an entry point of human resources in any organization. Employees are considered as the most important asset for any firm in order to achieve sustainable competitive advantage. However, with the recent trends and changes in environment such as advancement in technology, sourcing of candidates, varying economic conditions, changing work force diversity, shortage of skill labor, perception of employers, changing laws related to employment, managers are facing new challenges in order to attract best fit resources for the organizations.
Unlock your pathway to engineering excellence with Assignmentstudio’s CDR writing expertise. From meticulous document preparation to insightful guidance, we empower engineers like you to present compelling Competency Demonstration Reports (CDRs) for Australian immigration.
Recruitment and Selection:
Introduction: recruitment and selection process is a systematic process that a company or a firm needs to follow in order to ensure that they have attracted right resources that end up with the right company, at the right time doing the right job so that overall organizational goals are achieved (Henry and Temtime, 2009). Byars and Rue (1997, p 172) has defined recruitment as “the process of choosing from among available applicants, the individuals who are most likely to successfully perform a job”. Therefore, briefly stating, it is the procedure of collecting all the necessary and relevant information about the applicant, and based on the information a decision is reached whether to employ the individual or not. Selection on the other hand is considered as one of the most pivotal functions of HRM, because wrong selection may hamper organizations’ performance enormously (Dessler, 2007). Finally, as argued by Absar (2012), recruitment and selection are part of the same process of hiring suitable resources, and therefore, in this work have been used interchangeably.
Recent Development and Challenges: Recent developments and changes within organizational business environments have brought new challenges in the domain of personal selection. Specifically referring, technological advancements, changing social trends, globalization and the changes in the organization of work have made the organizations to revisit their modus operandi of employee recruitment and selection procedures. Hence the traditional model with psychometric roots may no longer deliver results (Herriot and Anderson, 1997; Iles, 1999). The traditional job selection paradigm discussed earlier requires stable jobs and therefore, emphasis is usually relied on individual job performance criteria, prediction of work outcomes and implementation of effective evaluation and assessment tools. However, as suggested, now a day’s jobs are not necessarily well defined. Additionally employees are requested to work in different team structures and projects changing their work roles more frequently, and may follow diverse career paths. At the same time, selection process is becoming more and more of a negotiation process with new challenges. Therefore, as argued by Iles (1999), besides psychometric paradigm, selection procedure has become a social process that focuses on applicants attitude and the overall impact of selection method (Iles and Robertson, 1997), applicants decision making in competitive labor market (Anderson et al, 2001b) and finally generation of a mutually beneficial emotional contract between employers and employees (Herriot, 1989).
The changing environments in which the organizations operate have clear implications on the process of recruitment and selection policy. Lievens et al (2002) have identified changing trends and challenges being faced by HR practitioners and categorized them based on interviewing several HR personnel and recent literature. According to Lievens et al (2002), inspection from the HR practitioners and subsequently from literature confirmed significant convergence and similarities of trends in recruitment and selection. Lievens et al further categorized the challenges into four different categories that include;
- Shortages in the Labor Market
- Development in Technology
- Perception of Applicants in Selection
- Constructive approach
For this work, author has taken an attempt to elaborate first three challenges.
HRM Activity – Interview
Name of Interviewee: Mr. Daniel N
Position: Recruitment consultant
Organization: BDS People Recruiting Company – Sydney Office
Length of Interview: 17 Minutes
Time of Interview: 11:00 am
Place of Interview: BDS People – Sydney Office
Background of Interviewee: Mr. Daniel N. has been associated with the field of recruitment for the last 8 years. Daniel received his graduate degree in human resources. Previously he has worked for Integrated Group and Skilled Group. Major responsibilities of Daniel include screening of candidates based on the clients’ requirements. Further, Daniel is usually involved in initial phase of the interview on behalf of the customer. Once satisfied, details of the incumbent are shared with clients for onward processing.
Daniel, even with his busy schedule, supported strongly above mentioned challenges. According to him, there is shortage of skilled and unskilled labor due to increasing demands of the clients. Further, Daniel suggested image of the company is very important from the perspective of recruiting top notch staff. Based on the interview, challenges and trends have been discussed below in the light of research and studies.
Challenges and Trends – Discussion
- Challenges to Attract Prospective Employees due to Shortage in Labor Market: Traditionally and continually, the main objective of personnel selection was to categorize the resources that are expected to have the highest added value for the organization over time. Also, organizations could benefitted not only when the instruments selected for personnel selection had higher validity, but also at the same time organizations could choose from a large number of applicants (Cascio, 1999). This is attributed to the fact that large pool of applicants enabled the organizations to be more careful to hire top choices and minimize the risk of taking in poor performing resources. In other words, traditional labor selection not only benefitted from an plentiful labor market, but was also based on the assumption that organizations had the option to choose among applications and virtually all job offers would be accepted by individuals (Lievens et al, 2002).
In recent years, shortage of labor has been observed in many countries. According to Barber, 1998, ‘war for talent’, the overall attraction of potential candidates have received increased research. Core to these researches is premise to identify factors that attract individuals to apply. For example, according to the studies undertaken by Turban et al (1998), it has been analyzed that organizations image an overall image of organization and its characteristics are directly related to organizational attractiveness.
Furthermore, since it is clear that organizational and recruiter attractiveness will not be same for all prospective applicants, the issue of person-organization fit has been discussed in many studies. Scheinder’s (1987) “attraction-selection-attrition” model has been used frequently by many theorists and researchers. According to this model, people depending on their personality, needs, norms and interests, are attracted to different types of organizations. Studies that supported this premise and examined attractiveness based on this model have been supportive of Schneider’s theory (Judge and Cable, 1997; Lievens et al, 2002).
Another important aspect that has been under consideration of study to attract prospective employees apart from person-organization fit is the application of marketing principles to the labor market shortage problems (Maurer et al, 1992). The principles of marketing may be relevant to address the concern as attracting and retaining employees have a lot in parallel to attracting and keeping customers. Cable and Turban (2000) put this application of marketing principles on test. Specifically, they applied the concept of “brand equity” to applicant’s job search activities. Research argument was based on the idea that image of an organization would have similar impact on applicants as with brands in marketing. Consistent with this hypothesis, Cable and Turban identified that applicants remembered more information from organizations that have a strong brand image. Further, employees were willing to get a little less pay for working for these prestigious companies. This can be associated with the literature of high involvement and long term purchase decisions.
Another study was carried out by Highhouse et al (1999). They emphasized the significance of company employment image and translated existing brand profiling techniques to a recruitment domain. Again, Slaughter et al (2001) used another concept of marketing i.e. brand personality to understand organizational attractiveness. Drawing on the research, these authors concluded that in early stages of recruitment, applicants ascribe personality traits to organizations. Slaughter et al argued that logically prospective applicants were drawn towards organizations that they think have similar personality traits as they have. These findings were consistent with the marketing literature suggesting that functional benefits in a market place are negligible and consumers primarily opt for products that have a self-expressive value (Plummer, 2000).
In short, labor market shortage across several countries have resulted in a greater concern for organizational image by the employers, the treatment of applicants during the recruitment process, application of marketing principles to further attract top prospective individuals. Until now, only a limited number of studies have been conducted to investigate and validate further marketing logic in recruitment. However, it is equally important to carefully borrow well researched studies and concepts from the domain of marketing (Lievens et al, 2002).
- Challenges for the use of Technological Developments for Recruitment and Selection: In last two decades, information technology has made inroads into organizations and working life, which has made a significant impact on the overall recruitment and selection practices of organizations HR departments. According to (Laudon and Turner, 1989) Information Technology can simply be categorized as hardware and software tools that can be used in order to collect, transmit various information in an organization.
Use of Multimedia: Organizations nowadays have increasingly started administering psychological tests and inventories via computers. The first application for the use of such tools can be traced back to 1960s (Burke, 1992). Since then, computers have established themselves as an efficient device for designing, administering, scoring and interpreting applicants test results. McBride (1998) further contends that recent efforts have been made to create and enhanced value through computerized tests. Multimedia tests that add the video and audio to the test are typical examples of computerized enhanced testing. Olson-Buchanan et al (1998) suggested that in multimedia tests, a short-videotaped work related situation is presented to the applicant that serves to increase the realism of the test. The situation usually freezes at an important situation where applicant is expected to response as if how they would act if this was a real situation.
According to Lievens et al (2002), there has been relatively little research on multimedia tests and their successful usage. Salgado and Lado (2000) investigated that predictive validity of video based testing is very promising. Additionally, applicants’ responses towards multimedia testing have been very positive. However, further research should be carried out to reinforce the predictive validity in multimedia testing. Candidate’s response may differ when simply asked to choose an alternative rather than to actually enact their response.
Use of Internet as a selection tool: A second influential technological development is the challenge to recruit through the use of the internet and World Wide Web (Bartram, 2001; Capelli 2001). Web based recruitment, sourcing of candidates and early stage prescreening of applicants are now a reality across the globe. Large multi-national organizations are ahead in this respect as they possess necessary resources and electronic recruitment systems.
