Chapter 6 Recruitment And Selection

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CHAPTER 6

Recruitment and Selection

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Recruitment

The process of attracting individuals on a timely basis, in sufficient numbers, and with appropriate qualifications, and encouraging them to apply for jobs with an organization.

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Aims

Recruitment Initial Screening Final Selection

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Importance of recruitment and selection

Management or Professional positions vs Clerical or Shop floor levels

Value of commitment and motivation Getting people with exact skills,

qualities and attitudes Workforce is becoming increasingly

heterogeneous Unsophisticated

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Recruitment and selection at Nissan UK

Shopfloor Production jobs11,500 applied for the first 500 vacancies Sophisticated selection process Application form -Seven pages in length Focus - Attitude and approach to

problem-solving rather then simple technical knowledge.

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What does recruitment selection involve?

Recruitment is the process of finding and attracting a pool of suitable candidates for the vacancy.

Advertising is important here. Pool of candidates

Next phase concerns initial screening To reduce the field to manageable proportions

Final selection phase

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Assessment of recruitment and selection processes.

Cost In terms of financial resources

Validity refers to the extent to which a particular

recruitment or selection technique is an accurate or valid predictor of actual job performance. (0-1)

Fairness Possibility of bias

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Does a vacancy exist? Avoid ‘automatic replacement syndrome’

Really necessary to recruit a replacement or Work can be reorganized or Rescheduled amongst existing staff

Initially via promotion, or whether it should be sourced externally via recruitment

Career advancement First step is to determined the type of person

or people the company ideally wishes to recruit

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Internal Promotion and External Recruitment

A. L. Weaver

President and Chief Executive Officer

R. E. Lewis

M.L. Denney J. Hicks

G. L. Newman

R. R. Jackson

B. W. Swain

Vice President, Human Resources

Manager, Human Resource Department

Benefit Analyst

Manager, CompensationManager. Employment

Salary Analyst

Retirement

B. Massenburg

B.B.S., State University

Promotion

Promotion

Promotion

External Recruit

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Conduct a job analysis Two components: a job specification and a person

specification Functional flexibility Wide range of job tasks when the workload requires Rapidly changing environments Completely different role in the near future (Bratton

and Gold, 1999) Identification of candidates that are willing to be

flexible, and that have the right attitudes and motivational qualities rather than searching for candidates that have a specific set of skills

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The Recruitment strategy

Internal advertisements, External advertisements in press

publications, Recruitment agencies, Executive search agencies, or Encouraging current employees to

ask friends and relatives to apply (so-called ‘grapevine’ Recruitment)

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Outside Sources of Recruitment

Advertisements Unsolicited

applications and resumes

Internet recruiting Employee referrals Executive search firms Educational institutions Professional

organizations

Labor unions Public employment

agencies Private

employment agencies

Temporary help agencies

Employee leasing

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The Recruitment strategy

The Recruitment process is a marketing exercise

Strength of their brands Reputations

By merging their recruitment strategy with their product marketing strategy. Such an approach involves adopting similar formats, styles and colours in recruitment advertisements as are used in product marketing advertisements (Capelli, 2001)

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E-recruitment

Online application forms Online assessment tests

More viable or more effective than traditional recruitment methods

McKinseys, Bain, Accenture, and PriceWaterhouseCoopers

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E-recruitment

IPD’s annual recruitment survey (Institute of Personnel and Development, 1999), 32 per cent of UK employers were recruiting through the Internet in 1999(up from 14 per cent in 1997)

In the US, 90 per cent of large US employers are already using e-recruitment (Capelli, 2001)

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Benefits of e-recruitment

Monster.com 18 million employee profiles and CV’s

available on-line (Capelli, 2001) Some companies have also established

Internet alumni networks. Re-establish contacts with former

employees that have left the company to work for competitor organisations.

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Benefits of e-recruitment (Capelli, 2001)

43 days to recruit - Using traditional techniques

6 days by posting jobs online 4 days if on-line application forms were used Further 7 days if applications were screened

electronically (e-rec - 17 days) Cost benefits Recruitment advertisements are expensive Quality of applicants higher

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Hot Recruiting SitesCareer Builder: http://www.careerbuilder.com Carries its own listings and offers links to sixteen

specialized career sites.Employment Guide: http://www.employmentguide.com Another leading career resource site, has thousands of

job listings from hundreds of major companies.FlipDog: http://www.flipdog.com Features more than 400,000 jobs and 57,000 employers

in 3,700 locations.HotJobs: http://www.hotjobs.com Owned by Yahoo, offers advanced management features

and smart agents to streamline the recruiting process.

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Hot Recruiting SitesJOBTRAK: http://www.jobtrak.com

A leading college recruiting site, has more than 40,000 listings and links to 750 campuses in the United States.JobWeb: http://www.jobweb.com

A college recruiting site run by the National Association of Colleges and Employers.Monster.com: http://www.monster.com

One of the oldest and largest general recruiting sites on the Internet, with more than 50,000 listings.Net-Temps: http://www.nettemps.com

The web’s leading site for recruiting tempsSpherion (formerly E. Span): http://www.spherion.com

One of the largest and best-known web recruiting sites.

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e-recruitment at British Airways www.britishairwaysjobs.com

Merrick, N. ‘Wel.com aboard’, People Management, 17 may 2001

“Leaders for Business” Management Training Programme - can apply through e-mail only

Ads posted traditionally & on web Received 5000 instead of 12000 (usual) Dealing with high quality base - valid way to

screen out people who are not conversant with web technology.

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Which recruitment techniques should a company use?

Type and level of vacancy Managerial or executive job as

opposed to a semi-skilled manual job

Time constraints Cost limitations

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Recruitment Techniques

Yield analysis A systematic yield analysis Ensuring fairness

Time-lapse analysis (Cascio, 1998) Executive search agencies tend to take a long time,

whereas employee referrals can be very quick Cost-per-hire

Executive search agencies - expensive Walk-ins & employee referrals - Cheaper

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Yield Ratio Percentage of applicants from a

recruitment source that make it to the next stage of the selection process.

100 resumes received, 50 found acceptable = 50% yield.

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Cost of Recruitment (per employee hired)

SC = source cost AC = advertising costs, total monthly expenditure (example:

$28,000) AF = agency fees, total for the month (example: $19,000) RB = referral bonuses, total paid (example: $2,300) NC = no-cost hires, walk-ins, nonprofit agencies, etc. (example:

$0) H = total hires (example: 119)

Cost to hire one employee = $414

HNCRBAFAC

HSC

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Initial screening

Application form Many countries have regulations

Biodata inventories Using psychometric techniques

Realistic job previews Case studies, job sampling or videos(Permack and Wanous, 1985)

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Initial screening Drug screening

Approximately 20 per cent of US private sector firms now drug-screen their applicants (Cascio, 1991)

Evidence to suggest that drug use predicts poorer job performance

Graphology Accuracy is unproven Experts argue that the tests can be ‘beaten’ (Saxe,

Dougherty and Cross, 1985)

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Initial screening

On-line tests Highly sophisticated psychometric

instruments For example, JP Morgan Chase contains

a clever on-line application for college students: a game based on job hunting and investment decisions, which elicits information about applicants’ interests, attitudes and abilities (Capelli, 2001)

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Initial screening

Online Tests Unsupervised Quite easily seek assistance Non-controlled and non-supervised

environment, may well be less than rigorous

Some companies retest candidates when they attend interview (People Management, 2001)

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Final selection

Companies include selection techniques like Interviews Assessment centres Tests and work samples

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Selection Techniques and the Frequency of Use

Technique Percentage of firms reporting use

Reference checking 96% Interviews 94%Application forms 87%Ability tests 78%Medical examinations 50%Mental ability 31%Drug tests 26%Personality inventory 17%Weighted application forms 11%Honesty tests 7%Lie detector tests 5%SOURCE: A.M. Ryan and P. Sackett, “A Survey of Individual Assessment Practices by I/O Psychologists,” Personnel

Psychology 40 (1987), pp. 455-488; Bureau of National Affairs, 1988-89 Survey of Fortune 500 Companies, Washington, D.C.; I.T. Robertson and P.J. Jakin, “Management Selection in Britain: A Survey and Critique,” Journal of Occupational Psychology 59, pp. 45-57.

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Percentage of Job Skills Testing in Selected Industries

TEST ALL JOB ONLY SELECTINDUSTRY APPLICANTS JOB CATEGORIES

Manufacturing 7% 49%

Financial Services 4% 68%

Wholesale and Retail 0% 53%

Business and Professional Services 2% 57%

Other Services 6% 63%

Source: American Management Association: “Job Skills Testing Questionnaire,” 1998.

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Final selection

Interviewing Focused interview Structured interviews Unstructured interviews

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Effectiveness of interview

A lot of evidence to suggest that their effectiveness ids poor

Structured interviews that are effective as predictors of future job performance

Validity of 0.62 Unstructured interviews Validity rating

of 0.31 (Anderson and Shackleton, 1993)

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Why are structured interviews so much more effective than unstructured interviews? Easier to objectively compare Necessarily asked the same set of

questions Extremely difficult

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Structured interviews as Behavioural interviews rather than as a situational interview (Barclay, 2001)

When interviews are unstructured –difficult

Highly subjective Reduces the validity of the process

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QUESTION:It is the night before your scheduled vacation. You are all packed and ready to go. Just before you get into bed, you receive a phone call from the plant. A problem has arisen that only you can handle. You are asked to come in to take care of things. What would you do in this situation?

RECORD ANSWER:

SCORING GUIDE:Good: “I would go in to work and make certain that everything is O.K.

Then I would go on vacation.” Good: “There are no problems that only I can handle. I would make

certain that someone qualified was there to handle things.” Fair: “I would try to find someone else to deal with the problem.” Fair: “I would go on vacation.”

Sample Situational Interview Question

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Researchers have found that subjectivity within the unstructured interview process takes a number of forms. Expectancy effect Primacy effect Contrast effect Quota effect Similar-to-me effect (Managing diversity at

Marks and Spencer, and British Telecom)

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Effectiveness of interview Researchers have found that

subjectivity within the unstructured interview process takes a number of forms. (Continued) Personal liking bias (Eg. Common sporting

grounds) Physical cues (Wearing Glasses are often

equated to intelligence) Ability to recall information (Memory of

interviewers??)

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Unstructured interviewing can be said as a Hallmark of an incompetent interviewer

US suggest that only about 35 per cent of companies use structured interviews (Cascio, 1991)

Implication is - 65 per cent of companies rely on unstructured interviewing

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Final selection tests

Cognitive ability tests - Numerical and verbal reasoning tests. Ability tests fall into two categories: attainment tests (which assess the skills a

candidate already possesses, such as typing skills), and

aptitude tests (which assess the likely ability of candidates to acquire new skills).

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Final selection tests

Work sample tests/job simulation tests Candidate is placed in a situation that they

are likely to face in the job itself Example - In-tray tests, asked to prioritize

the hypothetical workload in a logical manner

Mostly assess the methods and processes the candidates utilises rather than results they achieve

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Final selection tests Personality tests

100000 psychometric tests are taken every day in Western countries (Wilson, 1999:30).

Ability, aptitude and personality questionnaires are used mainly for managerial posts, while literacy and numeracy tests are more popular for clerical and secretarial positions (Beardwell and Holden, 2001)

Complementary to interviews, rather than replacing them

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Effectiveness of tests Ability, attainment and aptitude tests

Ability tests – 0.54 vs Work sample tests- 0.55 (Anderson and Shackleton, 1993)

Criticized by Robert Stenberg,Professor, Yale University, People Management, 1998 argues that successful people have 3 kinds of abilities

Analytical abilities Creative abilities Practical abilities

Conventional ability tests focus primarily on measurement of Analytical or abstract skills

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Effectiveness of tests

Personality tests (Beardwell and Holden, 2001) The extent to which personality is measurable The extent to which personality remains stable

over time The extent to which personality traits can be

identified The extent to which the completion of a

questionnaire

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Personality tests Problem of cultural bias

Need for achievement Assessing sales drive PA consulting (HR consultancy firm) iron

out Cultural inconsistencies

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Effectiveness of tests Assessment centres

Participants undertake a variety of tests, group exercises and interviews

observed by a team of multiple assessors Final decision based on pooled information Several days to complete -- costly process Accuracy is high but should be conducted

properly Reserved for management and graduate

selection - due to high costs

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Reference checks Reference request from previous and

current employers Mostly positive?? Debatable - Referee’s knowledge on

candidate’s on the job performance?? More used as factual check relating to

candidate’s qualifications and prior experience.

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Is there an ideal, or ‘one best way’ approach to final selection?

Vary depending upon the position being recruited to(such as whether managerial/professional as opposed to non-managerial)

Irrespective of the level of vacancy must carry out the processes of recruitment, initial screening and final selection in a through, systematic manner (Else no guarantee on suitable candidate)

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Final selection Tests can be highly accurate predictors of future

job performance (better to study candidate’s ability and personality)

Interviews should be freed up to assess other issues (speech, poise and appearance)

Person’s level of friendliness-ratings of a candidate’s friendliness in interviews frequently match supervisor assessments of friendliness in later appraisals??

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Public relations perspective Disheartening for applicants to be

rejected A candidate rejected today may well be

a potential customer in the future, so it makes good business sense to treat them with courtesy and respect

Interviews are to be structured if they are to prove effective.

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Recruitment and Selection: Country Differences

Anti-discrimination law in the US means that any R&S process has

to be undertaken very carefully.

Eg, words and phrases such as – man/girl; saleswoman; bar maid;

waitress; college student; recently retired; bilingual, are all

potentially illegal.

Each of these indicates a preference – gender, age, education and

nationality.

Selection procedures are also subject to legal constraints in US.

Application forms, interviews etc should all conform to the

requirement of being job related.

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In HK recruitment has traditionally occurred through

family networks (Torrington and Tan, 1995), although it

has been noted that ‘western’ methods have grown since

the 1980’s with the increasing use of advertising

(Kirkbride and Tang, 1989).

In Singapore only 53% of women are economically

active. One challenge is to attract women into the

workforce.

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The MOM in Singapore offers CareerLink@mom. This is an

advisory centre that provides job seekers with

information on employment and learning opportunities to

enhance employability.

It also provides employers with labour market trends and

information and they can source for suitable employees

from the database.

NTUC has an Employment Assistance Programme. The

SHRI also offers such services.

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There are also Tripartite Guidelines on Non-Discriminatory Job

Advertisements. These do not have legal force but aim to

reduce discrimination in this process.

Criteria that should not be used in job advertisements – race,

religion (unless required), marital status, age, gender (unless

required).

Acceptable criteria are – educational qualifications, releveant

skills and knowledge (‘proficient in both English and Malay’),

relevant attributes, relevant experience, other job

requirements.

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Core workers in Japanese corporations are recruited and selected

through rigorous processes requiring – resume, photograph, an

official family record, physical examination, letters of

recommendation. An entrance examination will also be

administered.

Japanese employers will seek the following – stability,

commitment, teamworking capability, and generalist rather than

specialist skills. Japanese companies tend to operate the

‘core’/’peripheral’ split. Women in Japan are recruited more

casually as their role is perceived as homemaker.

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In Korea employees are separated into 3 types of

employees – core, basic (permanent employees),

temporary employees.

Elements of the selection process in Korea would include –

test for specialist knowledge, test of English proficiency, a

personal interview.

The split between core and peripheral workers is again an

important one.

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Factors That Motivate Top Talent

Source: E. G. Chambers, H. Hanafield-Jones, S. M. Hankin, and E. G. Michaels, III, “Win the War for Top Talent,” Workforce 77, no. 12 (December 1998): 50–56. Used with permission of McKinsey & Co.

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Best and Worst Majors for Job-Hunting Graduates

Source: Patrick Scheetz, Employment Research Institute, Michigan State University.

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Occupational Breakdown of Temporary Help Agency

Placements

Source: Steve Jones, “You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby: What the Staffing Industry Offers Today,” Canadian HR Reporter 14, no. 19 (November 5, 2001): 15.