Literature Review on Recruitment and Selection Process

Keywords: recruitment literature review, literature review employee

Employee selection is the “process of collecting and evaluating information about an individual in order to extend an offer of employment ……(R.D. Gate wood and H.S. Field) Employee selection is part of the overall staffing process of the organization, which also includes human resource (HR) planning, recruitment, and retention activities. By doing human resource planning, the organization projects its likely demand for personnel with particular knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs), and compares that to the anticipated availability of such personnel in the internal or external labour markets. During the recruitment phase of staffing, the organization attempts to establish contact with potential job applicants by job postings within the organization, advertising to attract external applicants, employee referrals, and many other methods, depending on the type of organization and the nature of the job in question. Employee selection begins when a pool of applicants is generated by the organization’s recruitment efforts. During the employee selection process, a firm decides which of the recruited candidates will be offered a position.

Effective employee selection is a critical component of a successful organization. How employees perform their jobs is a major factor in determining how successful an organization will be. Job performance is essentially determined by the ability of an individual to do a particular job and the effort the individual is willing to put forth in performing the job. Through effective selection, the organization can maximize the probability that its new employees will have the necessary KSAs to do the jobs they were hired to do. Thus, employee selection is one of the two major ways (along with orientation and training) to make sure that new employees have the abilities required to do their jobs. It also provides the base for other HR practices-such as effective job design, goal setting, and compensation-that motivate workers to exert the effort needed to do their jobs effectively, according to Gatewood and Field.

Job applicants differ along many dimensions, such as educational and work experience, personality characteristics, and innate ability and motivation levels. The logic of employee selection begins with the assumption that at least some of these individual differences are relevant to a person’s suitability for a particular job. Thus, in employee selection the organization must

(1) Determine the relevant individual differences (KSAs) needed to do the job and

(2) Identify and utilize selection methods that will reliably and validly assess the extent to which job applicants possess the needed KSAs. The organization must achieve these tasks in a way that does not illegally discriminate against any job applicants on the basis of race, colour, religion, sex, national origin, disability, or veteran’s status.

An Overview of the Selection process:

Employee selection is itself a process consisting of several important stages, as shown in Exhibit 1. Since the organization must determine the individual KSAs needed to perform a job, the selection process begins with job analysis, which is the systematic study of the content of jobs in an organization. Effective job analysis tells the organization what people occupying particular jobs “do” in the course of performing their jobs. It also helps the organization determine the major duties and responsibilities of the job, as well as aspects of the job that are of minor or tangential importance to job performance. The job analysis often results in a document called the job description, which is a comprehensive document that details the duties, responsibilities, and tasks that make up a job. Because job analysis can be complex, time-consuming, and expensive, standardized job descriptions have been developed that can be adapted to thousands of jobs in organizations across the world. Two examples of such databases are the U.S. government’s Standard Occupational Classification (SOC), which has information on at least 821 occupations, and the Occupational Information Network, which is also known as O*NET. O*NET provides job descriptions for thousands of jobs.

An understanding of the content of a job assists an organization in specifying the knowledge, skills, and abilities needed to do the job. These KSAs can be expressed in terms of a job specification, which is an

2.2 Main Responsibilities of HRM

2.2.1 Getting the Best Employees

• Workforce planning
• Specifying Jobs and Roles
• Recruiting
• Outsourcing
• Screening Applicants
• Staffing — Selecting (Hiring) New Employees.

2.2.1.1 Workforce planning

a) Objective of Workforce Planning

Workforce planning is one of the most important activities in any organisation. It starts with analysis of the strategic position of the business. The results of this analysis then feed into a forecast of the required demand for labour by the organisation and how this is likely to be supplied. The final stage involves the creation and implementation of a human resources plan which aims to deliver the right number of the right people for the Organisation.

b) Strategy for workforce plan

The strategic position and requirement of the organisation have the most important influence on workforce planning:

Organisation objectives and scope of activities: what are the objectives of the organisation? What products are to be sold, in which markets; using what kind of distribution?

Organisation location – where is the organisation located? How are the various business units, divisions, functions distributed across the various locations? What specialist skills are essential in each location? What are the workforce implications of decisions on organisation location?

Labour environment: what is happening to the size of the labour force? What key population and employment trends (e.g. the increasing numbers of people working on temporary or short-term contracts) affect the ability of the business to recruit staff? What provision needs to be made for employee pension; what employment legislation

Timetables – to what extent does the strategic needs of the business require short-term changes in the workforce – or can change be achieved over a longer period. For example, are new retailing or distribution locations to be opened in the next 12 months that require staff?

c) Forecasting Workforce Demand

Putting a good Human Resources plan together requires an organisation to make a reasonably accurate forecast of workforce size. Key factors to consider in this forecast are:

• Demand for existing and new products/projects
• Organisation disposals and product closures
• Introduction of new technology (e.g. new production equipment)
• Cost reduction programmes (most usually involve a reduction in staff numbers somewhere within the business)
• Changes to the business organisational structure
• Business acquisitions, joint ventures, strategic partnerships

Forecasting Workforce Supply

The starting point for estimating supply is the existing workforce: an Organisation should take account of:

Scheduled changes to the composition of the existing workforce (e.g. promotions; job rotation)

Normal loss of workforce – e.g. through retirement, “normal” labour turnover

Potential exceptional factors – e.g. actions of competitors that create problems of staff retention

By comparing the forecast workforce demand and supply – it is possible to compile a forecast of net workforce size. This then needs to be compared with the strategic requirements for the organisation. The result is the “workforce gap” (which is a forecast of too few or too many workers). The role of HRM is to close the gap!

HRM – Policies to Close the Workforce Gap

The key HRM activities to manage the workforce gap comprise:

• Recruitment plans (how many people, where, what type, how)
• Training plans
• Redundancy plans
• Staff Retention Plans (how the business intends to keep the staff it wants to retain)

2.2.1.2 Specifying jobs and roles

This phenomenon includes two processes;

• Job specification
• Job description

Job Specification

Derived from job analysis, it is a statement of employee characteristics and qualifications required for satisfactory performance of defined duties and tasks comprising a specific job or function.

A job specification describes the knowledge, skills, education, experience, and abilities organisation believes are essential to performing a particular job. The job specification is developed from the job analysis.

A job specification cuts to the quick with organisation requirements whereas the job description defines the duties and requirements of an employee’s job in detail. The job specification provides detailed characteristics, knowledge, education, skills, and experience needed to perform the job, with an overview of the specific job requirements.

Job Description

Job descriptions are essential. Job descriptions are required for recruitment so that organisation and the applicants can understand the role. Job descriptions are necessary for all people in the organisation. A job description defines a person’s role and accountability. Without a job description it is not possible for a person to properly commit to, or be held accountable for, a role.

Smaller organisations commonly require staff and managers to cover a wider or more mixed range of responsibilities than in larger organisations (for example, the ‘office manager’ role can comprise financial, HR, stock-control, scheduling and other duties). Therefore in smaller organisations, job descriptions might necessarily contain a greater number of listed responsibilities, perhaps 15-16. However, whatever the circumstances, the number of responsibilities should not exceed this, or the job description becomes unwieldy and ineffective.

Some feature in most job descriptions are as following;

• communicating ( How to communicate with upper and lower level of management from his/her level)
• Panning and organising.
• Managing information and general administration support.
• Monitoring and reporting.
• Financial budgeting and control
• Producing things.
• Maintaining and repairing.
• Quality control.
• Health and safety.
• Using equipment and system.
• Developing and creating things.

Importance of Job Description:

Job descriptions improve an organisation’s ability to manage people and roles in the following ways:

• Clarifies organisation expectations for employees.
• Provides basis of measuring job performance
• Provides clear description of role for job candidates
• Provides a structure and discipline for company to understand and structure all jobs and ensure necessary activities, duties and responsibilities are covered by one job or another
• Provides continuity of role parameters irrespective of manager interpretation
• Enables pay and grading systems to be structured fairly and logically
• Prevents arbitrary interpretation of role content and limit by employee and employer and manager
• Essential reference tool in issues of employee/employer dispute
• Essential reference tool for discipline issues
• Provides important reference points for training and development areas
• Provides neutral and objective reference points for appraisals, performance reviews and counselling
• Enables formulation of skill set and behaviour set requirements per role
• Enables organisation to structure and manage roles in a uniform way, thus increasing efficiency and effectiveness of recruitment, training and development, organisational structure, work flow and activities, customer service, etc
• Enables factual view (as opposed to instinctual) to be taken by employees and managers in career progression and succession planning

Job Description Components:

Job Title

Based at (Business Unit, Section – if applicable)

Position reports to (Line Manager title, location, and Functional Manager, location if matrix management structure)

Job Purpose Summary (ideally one sentence)

Key Responsibilities and Accountabilities, (or ‘Duties’. 8-15 numbered points)

Dimensions/Territory/Scope/Scale indicators (the areas to which responsibilities extend and the scale of responsibilities – staff, customers, territory, products, equipment, premises, etc)

Date and other relevant internal references

Hiring:

Organisation basically has two main resources to get Human resources

Internal Promotion

Recruitment

Outsourcing

Internal Promotions:

In this scenario existing employees of the organisation are promoted to fill the required place in the organisation.

Recruitment:

In this case organisation takes new employees in the organisation to fill the vacant places.

Outsourcing:

Outsourcing refers to a company those contracts with another company to provide services.

Recruitment and Selection:

Recruitment is the process of identifying that the organisation needs to employ someone up to the point at which application forms for the post have arrived at the organisation.

Employee selection is the “process of collecting and evaluating information about an individual in order to extend an offer of employment (R.D. Gate wood and H.S. Field) Employee selection is part of the overall staffing process of the organization, which also includes human resource (HR) planning, recruitment, and retention activities. By doing human resource planning, the organization projects its likely demand for personnel with particular knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs), and compares that to the anticipated availability of such personnel in the internal or external labour markets. During the recruitment phase of staffing, the organization attempts to establish contact with potential job applicants by job postings within the organization, advertising to attract external applicants, employee referrals, and many other methods, depending on the type of organization and the nature of the job in question. Employee selection begins when a pool of applicants is generated by the organization’s recruitment efforts. During the employee selection process, a firm decides which of the recruited candidates will be offered a position.

Effective employee selection is a critical component of a successful organization. How employees perform their jobs is a major factor in determining how successful an organization will be. Job performance is essentially determined by the ability of an individual to do a particular job and the effort the individual is willing to put forth in performing the job. Through effective selection, the organization can maximize the probability that its new employees will have the necessary KSAs to do the jobs they were hired to do. Thus, employee selection is one of the two major ways (along with orientation and training) to make sure that new employees have the abilities required to do their jobs. It also provides the base for other HR practices-such as effective job design, goal setting, and compensation-that motivate workers to exert the effort needed to do their jobs effectively……. Gate wood and Field.

Organisational document that details what is required to successfully perform a given job. The necessary KSAs are called job requirements, which is simply means they are thought to be necessary to perform the job. Job requirements are expressed in terms of desired education or training, work experience, specific aptitudes or abilities, and in many other ways. Care must be taken to ensure that the job requirements are based on the actual duties and responsibilities of the job and that they do not include irrelevant requirements that may discriminate against some applicants. For example, many organizations have revamped their job descriptions and specifications in the years since the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act to ensure that these documents contain only job-relevant content.

Validity of selection methods

Validity refers to the quality of a measure that exists when the measure assesses a construct. In the selection context, validity refers to the appropriateness, meaningfulness, and usefulness of the inferences made about applicants during the selection process. It is concerned with the issue of whether applicants will actually perform the job as well as expected based on the inferences made during the selection process. The closer the applicants’ actual job performances match their expected performances, the greater the validity of the selection process.

Selection methods

A Organisation should use selection methods that reliably and accurately measure the needed qualifications. The reliability of a measure refers to its consistency. It is defined as “the degree of self-consistency among the scores earned by an individual.” Reliable evaluations are consistent across both people and time. Reliability is maximized when two people evaluating the same candidate provide the same ratings, and when the ratings of a candidate taken at two different times are the same. When selection scores are unreliable, their validity is diminished. Some of the factors affecting the reliability of selection measures are:

Emotional and physical state of the candidate. Reliability suffers if candidates are particularly nervous during the assessment process.

Lack of rapport with the administrator of the measure. Reliability suffers if candidates are “turned off” by the interviewer and thus do not “show their stuff” during the interview.

Inadequate knowledge of how to respond to a measure. Reliability suffers if candidates are asked questions that are vague or confusing.

Individual differences among respondents. If the range or differences in scores on the attribute measured by a selection device is large, that means the device can reliably distinguish among people.

Question difficulty. Questions of moderate difficulty produce the most reliable measures. If questions are too easy, many applicants will give the correct answer and individual differences are lessened; if questions are too difficult, few applicants will give the correct answer and, again, individual differences are lessened.

Length of measure . As the length of a measure increases, its reliability also increases. For example, an interviewer can better gauge an applicant’s level of interpersonal skills by asking several questions, rather than just one or two.

Up to this point, our discussion has assumed that an employer needs to validate each of its:

Studies summarizing a selection measure’s validity for similar jobs in other settings.

Data showing the similarity between the jobs for which the validity evidence is reported and the job in the new employment setting.

Data showing the similarity between the selection measures in the other studies composing the validity evidence and those measures to be used in the new employment setting.

Making final selection:

The extensiveness and complexity of selection processes vary greatly depending on factors such as the nature of the job, the number of applicants for each opening, and the size of the organization. A typical way of applying selection methods to a large number of applicants for a job requiring relatively high levels of KSAs would be the following:

Use application blanks, resumes, and short interviews to determine which job applicants meet the minimum requirements for the job. If the number of applicants is not too large, the information provided by applicants can be verified with reference and/or background checks.

Use extensive interviews and appropriate testing to determine which of the minimally qualified job candidates have the highest degree of the KSAs required by the job.

Make contingent offers to one or more job finalists as identified by Step 2. Job offers may be contingent upon successful completion of a drug test or other forms of back-ground checks. General medical exams can only be given after a contingent offer is given.