Recruitment and Selection Process in Interviewing Anyone

Recruitment and Selection Process in Interviewing

Anyone who has ever hired an employee -- or, for that matter, anyone who has ever been hired for a job -- is aware of the fact that there is often a very poor fit between the newly hired person and the job. This is often true despite the best efforts of the person tasked with the hiring, and despite careful consideration of past employment records, the training and education of the worker, recommendations, background checks, and various tests that may be given to the person during the interview process.

People hired for jobs for which they are not suitable cause a number of problems for the company, which may well invest a considerable amount of resources in the person hoping to correct the problems that arise from a bad fit between position and employee, only to have to fire the person in the end (which may open up the company to liability issues) and begin again. The company will also see lowered productivity in terms of efficiency while the employee is trying to do a job that s/he is not in fact well suited to. Other workers may also be less efficient or productive because of the tension caused in a company by having someone who is perceived as not pulling her or his wait or who is clearly unhappy at having a position that does not suit her or him.

There is also the fact that a person not suited to a position will in nearly all cased suffer from that ill-fittingness, experiencing feelings of incompetence and anger as well as possible depression. Such feelings can spread throughout a workplace, but even if they do not, no company representative should want to make any new employee suffer because a poor hiring choice has been made.

The solution to such problems -- for both the company and the applicant -- is to put into place a hiring system that facilitates the best possible fit between the needs of an employer and the strengths that an applicant can bring to the position. This paper examines one of those techniques, that of the one-on-one interview. This technique can also be used in other forums, including a range of scholarly work, for its purpose -- to fit a person about whom an interviewer knows relatively little into a position that is significant to the interviewer -- is a highly useful one in a number of circumstances.

This interviewing technique is generally referred to as the recruitment and selection technique, and both of these aspects of the process are equally important. The general utility of a method that successfully targets the best possible employee is described by Schmidt and Hunter (1998):