Recruitment and selection process of the fast food industry

This dissertation will discuss the recruitment and selection process of the fast food industry in London and case study about particular company. The practise of HRM in recruitment and selection process will also be discussed in this dissertation. In this chapter the background and motivation of this study is discussed along with the aims and objective. Moreover the research questions and the structure of this dissertation are discussed in this chapter.

1.2. Background and motivation

In the past two decades the manner in which organization recruit people for their business has changed into a different level. The practise of human resource management in recruiting people has made a significant changed in the food industry across Greater London. People’s food habit and ass well as recreational activities has also changed. And for changing those activities fast food played a very vital role in society. The competition among the competitors become intense as this is a very profit oriented business. As the competition gets intense and moves into higher value added work, strategic recruitment and selection is vital for organizations success.

The trend of fast food can be tracked from the very early stage of the civilization and in UK from the beginning of the twentieth first century first food is growing as a lucrative business. Fast food gain popularity as people’s life gets busy and subsequently more and more things added in their life. The chain fast food shop start arriving in UK from the late 60’s and KFC was the first to introduce followed by Pizza Hut and Mc Donald’s.

The practise of HRM into the fast food industry was present from the beginning but in many cases in was written or not classified as a necessary step. But in recent years the fast food chains bring themselves under very strict rules and policies. Trained staff always brings more profit to the business. And also for the past decades the kind of people interested in getting those job has changed significantly. Mostly students are seen in these jobs as it gives them the flexibility of working according to their college time table and also they can support their study while their working part time.

The main principal for any job is the right person for the right job. Organizations always give importance for its manpower as they are their representative and profit maker of the organization. The operative manpower is equally important as managers working for the enterprise. All business organisations need different people to operate different activities inside their organization and it is equally important to select and recruit suitable candidate for that job. The practise of Human Resource Management in an organization is not possible if suitable candidate is not recruited in the organization.

1.3. HRM practise in the Travel Food industry in London

In late 1990s, the HRM was significantly recognised as an integral component of business success by academic researchers and business practitioners (Kalleberg and Moody, 1994; Paul and Anantharaman, 2003; Hislop, 2005). Different arguments and concepts were presented by these researchers particularly how HR practices could affect organisation performance; how economic and social context shapes HR strategies and practices of organisations; the new organisational forms and relationships; and the importance of knowledge management and learning in the workplace.

Every organization understands the need of HRM practise in selection and recruitment process. By doing so they prepared particular recruitment and selection plan according to the need of their own organization. Mc Donald’s and SSP Ltd collaborated with different university to train up their manager according to their need. Most of the big franchises are tied up with different universities to train their staff in hospitality and Human Resource Management. And if we consider the practise of HRM most food franchise company nowadays has made their own prospectus and procedures about recruiting people.

Selection and recruitment are two very interrelated process where one process ends another process starts. They are very important procedure of the organization and different from each other.

3.1 Bright Features

SSP is promoting itself as food and travel expert, so giving the best possible service to customer is at the heart of SSP strategy. As a result it is important for the company to maintain cutomer satisfaction. So to maintained customer satisfaction employee job satisfaction is vital as dissatisfied worker may not provide good service to the customers. One who is happy at work place is more likely to influence other in a positive manner to make other happy. Therefore, to increase the satisfaction of customer it is important that employees at different level working for SSP are satisfied. Both at management level as well as ground level were actual customer service is being delivered. Company have a good mix of employees of different backgrounds which makes it even more capable to provide international quality service to its customers. Further, organisation also carry out research for understanding customer need during travelling, as it operates worldwide in 32 country to meet the demands of travelling customers. On the basis of customer demands of each location and information gathered through research, company have always tried to provide customers a good mix of food verity that meets their appetite.

1.4. HRM practise in SSP UK Ltd (Camden Food)

The concept that people are the organisation’s key source of sustained competitive advantage continues to be an overriding theme in the research literature and a lever for Human Recourse practitioners Grattan, (2000); Pfeffer, (1994); Barney, (1995). It is not surprising, therefore, that the link between HRM practices and employee and organisational performance has attracted considerable attention over the past decade both in the US Huselid, (1995); Pfeffer, (1998) and the UK Guest, (1997); Wood and deMenzes, (1998).

1.4. Aims and objective

The aim of this research is to help industry expert and employee to understand the importance of HRM in recruitment and selection process and the give an overall idea how effective HRM practise can change the recruitment process.

The purpose of this study is to give a clear understanding what are the HRM practises used by the employer to select and recruit employee at present.

Also suggest employer how the selection and recruitment process can be made more effective.

The primary research question are listed as below

1. What procedures are used in recruiting and selecting employee in the industry and how the practise of HRM is ensured in that process? The dissertation will try to find out different process of selecting and recruitment process undertaken by different player in the industry. The reason why these methods are preferred?

2. How selection and recruitment process can be more effective and how it can contribute performance of the employee.

1.5. Limitation of the study

Limitation in any study is not an unusual matter. Every research encountered by limitation. The study is undertaken in a small sample group from the hospitality industry and fast food industry. There are many organizations in the industry and many more way of selecting and recruiting people. This is a major limitation of the study as the finding only concentrates a particular organization. A larger sample size would give the chance to go through more data and also the application of both personal and HR functions. It can also be possible to investigate variety of examples of organizational practise if the sample size is larger. It would be better to investigate more than two organizations recruitment and selection process, but due to time constraint this could not be achieved. The researcher selected two group of people one pass through the selection process and get recruited and the other group who is looking for job or attempted but failed to pass the recruitment process. Some data were confidential enough not to pass to the researcher. As the topic of the dissertation covers a very wide area, researcher tried to cover as many areas as possible.

1.6. Contribution of the study

The analysis of the study reveals the aims and objective of the research. Among the contributions are the literature for the researchers in future in relation to the HRM practice for the other industry. Analyzing the function of modern human resource management is another contribution in the perspective of academic study.

Secondly, HR manager of travel food industry and more specifically SSP UK Ltd can evaluate their existing recruitment and training program. The study will help understand the standard recruitment and selection procedure and thus compare it with their own recruitment and selection procedure.

1.7. Research structure

This study will follow a certain structure. The structure followed is given below

Chapter 1: The introduction part will discuss the purpose of the study and also the aim and objective of the study. It will also briefly discuss the motivation and background of the study. A short description about the industry and also the history of the industry.

Chapter 2: The literature review part will discuss the HRM practise in recruitment and selection process. It will also discuss the related theory about selection and recruitment process. The part will consist the definition of recruitment and selection and the process of respective ones. This part will relate the theoretical analysis and also states the finding of different scholar in this field.

Chapter 3: In chapter three general research methodologies are described. It also discuss the method that this research use to complete the study. The data collection method and the difference between secondary data and primary data are also discussed. The limitations of the data collections are discussed at the end of the research.

Chapter 4: Findings of the study and data are discussed in this chapter. Data are gathered from different sources for the study each source has been described with the method used.

Chapter 5: At the end of the dissertation a thorough indication and conclusion of the current research have been drawn. Other important part of this chapter is to describe the contribution and benefit of this dissertation. Based on the research results some recommendations have been given followed by limitations of the current study, and future research.

2. Literature review 3250

2.1. Introduction

The relevant literature review of this study is discussed in this chapter. The previous chapter has been discussed about introduction of the study which discussed the motivation and background, the aims and objective of the study and also the structure of the study. The chapter starts with a brief discussion about HRM and the role of HRM in recruitment and selection. The relevant theory about recruitment and selection are discussed followed by their process. The factors influencing the recruitment and selection process are also discussed. The historical work of previous researcher are also discussed and used as a guideline for further research.

2.2. The role of HRM

The key characteristic of the HRM approach is the involvement of the personal function at a strategic level. The increased globalisation of busyness world and a very competitive market has triggered the emergence pf human resource management. Personnel management is the part of an organization which is concerned with people at work and their relationship with the enterprise. Personnel management aims to achieve both efficiency and justice. It seeks to provide fair terms and conditions of employment, and satisfying work for those employed (Cole, 2002).

The modern human resource management has emerged from traditional personal management. Human resource management is defined as a strategic and coherent approach to the management of an organization’s most valuable assets – the people working there who individually and collectively contribute to the achievement of its objectives (Armstrong 2006). It is the people who always represent the organization in front of the public, so the management of people inside the organization is very important. And it is the trained and skilled staffs that generate the profit and give the organization a better position in the market. Organizations now days even compete about their staff that who has the better staff. They even hire independent organization to judge the service between different companies and based on that report they improve their service and organization.

The synergy is achieved when the approaches are practiced all together. When practices are implemented together and synergistically then it is called ”bundles”. The concept of ”bundling” has defined strict definition but finds its roots in the concept of internal fit developed in the strategic human resource management literature (Bowen and Ostroff, 2004). The organization can deliver better service if all part of their business is providing a quality service and thus the organization as a whole performs better.

If an organization implement couple of high performance work practise in their workplace that will not make a big difference as they are still lacking in many other part of organization skills. Suppose the organization implement team work as their high performance achievement but the total team performance will depend not only on one colleague but the performance of all colleagues. Different team members can have different issue with organization which might affect their performance so that also make a difference on the collective performance of the team work. Employment motivation is also a very important fact in case of team work.

In 1998, British Workforce Relation survey (WERS) conduct a survey among the employer in Britain and found that there are some number of key human resourse management practise among British organisations that includes careful recruitment and selection, performance appraisal, training and team working. The survey also found some evidence of the integration of human resource management practise and survey(Cully et al.1999).

There are two different side of the survey which is visible through data, the practice of human resource management in British organization is widespread but the level of strategic integration of these practises is quit low. Cully et al found is his research that only 15 percent of the role of training in 265 workplaces had a majority of the human resource management in place. Studies of high performance work systems have also shown a similar pattern; relatively common adoption of individual practices but little evidence of widespread integration (Appelbaum et al., 2000).

2.3. Recruitment

There are few definitions available of recruitment. Recruitment involves actions and activities taken by an organization in order to identify and attract individuals to the organization who have capabilities to help the organization realize its strategic objective. Breaugh gave the following definition of recruitment “Employee recruitment involves those organisational activities that 1) influence the number and /or the types of applicants who apply for a position and /or 2)affect whether a job offer is accepted”. Edwin Flipo states that “recruitment is the process of searching for prospective candidate and stimulating them to apply for the job.”(Edwin Flipo, 2001)

Recruitment includes the set of activities undertaken by the organisation for the primary purpose of identifying a desirable group of applicant, attracting them into its employee ranks, and retaining them at least for short time. (Taylor & Collins, 2000).

Recruitment involves actions and activities taken by an organisation in order to identify and attract individuals to the organisation who can help the organisations achieve their target and goal. Recruitment has emerged as arguably the most critical human resource management functions for organisational survival and success. Many organisations have increased their budget for recruitment.

2.3.1. Principal of recruitment process

There are number of important characteristic in recruitment definitions. Firstly the process involves specific actions and activities that are undertaken to achieve particular outcome. Secondly in indicates that the purpose of those activities are to generate a pool of candidate to enhance their interest towards the organisations and eventually to accept a job offer in the organisation. The third important characteristic is that it the number of people attracted towards the process might have the capabilities to be hired but it depends on the selection process where the overqualified and under qualified people will be excluded from the process. Fourthly the recruitment is the process where any post hire process are not discussed because recruitment is the process to influence candidate to apply for the advertise jobs and accept the job offer.

2.3.2. Purpose and importance of recruitment

There are some purpose and importance of recruitment which required to be clearly defined in any research. The importance can described as follows

1. Determine the present and the future requirements of the organisation on conjunction with its personnel -planning and job analysis activities.

2. To keep the cost minimum and also attracting maximum candidate.

3. As selection process depends on recruitment process it is the job of the recruitment process to increase the success rate of selection process by reducing the under qualified or overqualified job applicant.

4. It is also the recruitment process where the it is given priority that the recruited candidate stays inside the organisation for maximum number of year.

5. Organisations legal and social obligation about the ratio of recruited people whether ethnic, local or gender in its workforce is also served through recruitment.

6. Recruitment is the first step where the potential job applicants are identified.

7. By practising the daily job the effectiveness of different recruiting techniques and sources of all types of job applicants are explored.

2.3.3. Recruitment process

In recruitment process identifying and attracting qualified candidate is the most important aspect. There are five interrelated steps about recruitment process. They are-

Planning

Strategic development

Searching

Screening

Evaluation and control

2.3.1. Planning

Planning is the first stage of the recruitment process. It involves about the vacancy and the duty surrounded by that role. Planning also gave an clear idea about number of candidate and the type of candidate applying for the job. An important part of the planning is to attract more people than the organisation needed so that they can choose the right candidate and also attracting the type of candidate similar to the advertisement.

2.3.2. Strategic development

After deciding how many people are required and what qualification required the management concentrate in the strategic development. Different companies have different view about strategic development. The first thing is to decide in strategic development is to decide whether to recruit someone with past experience or whether to recruit someone with fresh knowledge and invest towards the future training of that employee. After deciding the eligibility of the employee the organisations look different medium to advertise the job and which labour market they want to target. All these activities are inside the strategic development of recruitment.

2.3.3. Searching

The searching process begins after the planning and strategic development. If the first two processes run well then in searching process the organisation should receive many application because at this stage the medium is activated as the HR manager gives green signal about vacancy inside the organisation. All the application must be screened and after careful screening the candidates who passed should called for interview and the candidates did not pass should sent letter explaining the reason of failure. Another important criteria about searching process is to pass the proper massage through the proper channel. And it is the duty of searching option that maximum attention gets from the candidate by avoiding the undesirables.

2.3.4. Screening

The selection process begins after a carefully scrutinizing the candidate at the recruitment process. However good the attraction process it is probable that there will be more candidates than positions to be filled and often the case there that there will candidates than can be realistically taken on to the next stage of more time consuming selection processes such as interviewing and testing. The reason for screening inside the recruitment process is that selection process starts only after candidates are short listed for the next stage.

2.3.4. Sources of recruitment

There are two types how recruitment are processed in an organisation. They are internal recruitment and external recruitment.

2.3.4.1. Internal recruitment

The advantages of internal recruitment are that: financial costs associated with recruiting can be saved by internal recruiting. It will also save training costs and time as the employee will have insight knowledge of the organization (Wanous, 1992). There are some tools organisation uses for internal recruitment.

Promotions and transfers

Promotions and transfers are very important role for internal recruitment. Promotions have very positive role inside the organisations as they encourage colleague, built moral attributes among employee. Through this process organisations can build employee by their need and as those employees are serving for a long time for the company they feel for their organisation.

Employee referrals

When an employee is working for an organisation for a long time they know the need of the organisation and sometime they refer employees according the need of the organisation. This way organisation can sometime get high skilled employee but in a very minimum cost. Another positive side about employee reference is through this employer are fulfilling their social obligation and establishing goodwill.

Former employees

Another source of internal recruitment is former employee. Former employees sometimes return to the organisation for better career growth and also sometime after in another job they can compare which is better this way they can differentiate which employee is better.

2.3.4.2. External recruitment

External recruitment makes is possible interview a wide a range of candidate and chose from that selection. Sometimes employer need to pump some fresh blood inside their organisation to get some new business ideas and also to put some energy inside the organisation. But sometimes company end up with huge cost for hiring external employees but they are not as qualified as their curriculum vita says.

Advertisement

The most popular method of job recruitment is the advertisement through different medium. Employers describe the job responsibilities and requirement of the job followed by how to apply and by which date they have to apply. The most popular medium of advertisement are the newspaper, company website and different jobsite which post job from different company. Most people apply through this medium and sometimes company also promote themselves through these advertisements.

Professional and trade association

Professional association for trade and technical bodied are very active in the field of recruitment and selection. They provide employer with people according to their need and those professionals are trained with international standard. Like for accountant and technical jobs are always preferred by the professional bodies. Now days there are some websites like linked in which network among different professional people.

Walk in store

Another popular method among the employee or ob seeker for different store and food shops are known as walk in store. Company advertise in front of the stores or there is a particular place where companies hired. In Europe and other western countries where the chain stores are established they managed to recruit people from their own recruitment centre. In this process mostly entry level and unskilled employees are hired. Employer sometime announces open day recruitment for hiring people. Through open day recruitment organisation

External Forces

Supply & Demand

Unemployment Rate

Labour Market

Political – Legal

Image

Recruitment

Internal Forces

Recruitment Policy

HR Planning

Size of the Firm

Growth & Expansion

2.4. Selection

Selection is the process where employer chooses from a pool of candidate who is best suitable for the organisation. From the beginning of the selection process till the end selecting the right candidate is the only objective and to do that there are different test that employer choose to differentiate among the candidate. Selection is a process of differentiating between applicants in order to identify those with a greater likelihood of a success in a job. (Stone, 1999)

Selection is a very constructive process through which right candidates comes out.

2.4.1. Preliminary interview

The first step of the selection process is the preliminary interview process which comprises the subject to scrutiny the candidate based on their application and also eliminates the unqualified candidate. For HR managers scrutiny is the process to eliminate candidate based on the information provided on their application. Preliminary interview is the next available step for selection. Preliminary interview helps get that information which is not in the available in the application form. It can be held formally or informally, over the telephone or in a coffee shop. It helps HR manager to get an idea how many applicants can make it through the next stage and eventually will go forward.

The interview processes are different in different countries. In UK they are more structured type. In UK they said that the more information you get about a person the reliable the person and the more valid and reliable your judgment is. Tixier in a survey in EU (but excluding France) Sweden, Switzerland and Austria found that structured interview were favoured in the UK, Scandinavia, Germany and Austria. This contrasted with Italy, Portugal, Luxembourg and Switzerland where unstructured were preferred (Tixer, 1996)

2.4.2. Selection test

The essential criterion in choosing supplementary method is that they should provide information that is directly related to performance on the job. This should be the guiding principal both in choosing off-the-shelf tests and in designing exercises tailor-made for a particular workplace. In their review of what they call personal testing, Murphy and Davidshofer (2001) stress that better results are obtained the more closely a test, such as work sample test, resembles things that are actually done in the job concerned. A related issue that candidate can easily see the point of a test that requires them to do something they know will be done on the job.

Psychological testing

The term psychological tests are also known as psychometric test. They are developed to judge people based on their different capability. They are professionally developed and checked for reliability and validity. They are administered and scored in a standardized manner. The results found from these tests can be compared to norms for relevant population.

The standardised administration of tests means all applicants answer the same questions in the same condition and objective scoring means that the scores are not open to individual interpretation as is the case with interview responses.

Intelligence test

Intelligence test is the most widely practised test in the selection process. The ranges of skills cover are verbal, arithmetical and diagrammatical reasoning. Selection team use intelligence test as one of the first tool to judge a candidate.

Ability test

Ability test are more specific test designed for individual to show their ability towards a particular test. How well a person can perform in a job can also be tested through this. There are two type of ability test one is attainment test and the other is aptitude test. Attainment test assess skills and knowledge that have been acquired through experience and learning, and aptitude test measure individuals potential to develop ability. Work sample test or school exams are examples of attainment test and the use of these would not require the special training.

Where as aptitude test measure whether a applicant have the ability to learn something if training is provided. Most of the time aptitude test run when the candidate has no previous experience. It gives the indication that how successfully an individual can engage in a specialized activities. There is different type of aptitude test for all sector of the organization.

Test of interest

The relationship between interests and motivation and successful performance is not a straightforward one. For this reason these test are not used for selection (Smith and Robertson1993). But interest test can be used in career guidance and counselling. It gives an idea about the likings and disliking of the employee and give a hint sometimes why employee want to change their career.

Personality questionnaire

Personality questionnaire has been used in preference to personality test. When measuring the personality test there is no right or wrong answer rather than they are indication of habitual performance meaning that they reflect stable traits that are likely to be revealed in typical behaviour. Personality test is very important in case of job application. A person can do well in the entire test but may fall short as they have lack of motivation. It shows the maturity, interpersonal skill and behaviour in terms of difficult situation.

2.4.3. Work sample test

When recruiter asks a candidate to perform a task that is related to the work or a element which is part of the job is known as work sample test. A recruiter may ask the employee to perform a lecture or to teach a subject to a group of people as a part of work sample test if the interview is about university lecturer.

2.4.4. Assessment centres

An assessment centre is a method rather than a place, although some employer, particularly large organization might have premises dedicated to assessment, especially if they use them for both selection and development purposes. (Woodruffe, 2000) In a assessment centre a number of people are assessed at the same time by a number of assessor judging their numerical skill, interpersonal skill and how they coup with their colleague. This gives the chance to the employer to compare collection of range of information and observation and evaluation the candidate.

The task included in an assessment centre test is work simulation where candidate were given a real life task usually performed in job. A based on their performance it is easier for a recruiter to distinguish the potential candidate. Group exercise is another tool used in assessment centre. Different employer use different tailor made tests or exercises.

2.4.5. Interview

The next step of the process is interview. This is the most important part of the selection process. An interviewer matches the performance of previous results taken from different test and compares them with resume and asks question if they feel. Interview is a oral examination of the candidate. Employer try to get more information about candidate through interview and they also discuss about the role featured and about the company.

There are different type of interview through which employer can judge a candidate. Among them the most popular are formal interview where employer will fixed a time in the office and a panel of interviewer or a person taking the interview. Interviews some time are very structured and sometimes it is unstructured giving the interviewer the chance to talk about himself and interact based on his conversation.

When going for managerial or supervisory position a panel of interviewer take the interview and use different technique to judge the mentality of the candidate. Interviews are also arranged in a dinner table at some restaurant or over the phone. All these interviews are one reason that is to find out if the candidate is suitable enough for the position he is applied for.