Effects of the Recruitment and Selection Process

HR strategies differ at times from management strategies. One study conducted in the early 90's highlighted the dominant HR strategies of one company. " ... a cost reduction strategy and an employee commitment strategy. These strategies were distinguished from one another on the basis of five realms of HR policy and practice: work organization, employee relations, staffing, training, and compensation" (Bamberger, Biron and Meshoulam, 2014. P. 56). Cost reduction strategies aim to augment efficiency through enforcement of employee compliance with detailed procedures and rules as well as basing things like employee rewards on some assessable criteria.

Commitment strategy on the other hand is meant to develop a team of dedicated employees that can be trusted to use their discretion in order to perform job tasks in ways consistent with the goals and aims of the organization. The study established that the organization's commitment strategy is a collection of practices categorized by "higher levels of employee involvement in decision making, enhanced employee training in problem solving, a stronger emphasis on socialization-oriented development activities, selection methods aimed at maintaining higher ration of skilled to unskilled employees, and a higher average wage rate" (Bamberger, Biron and Meshoulam, 2014, p. 56). By maintaining a higher ration of skilled to unskilled employees, companies have a lesser turnover rate since the skilled employees are a valuable resource to the company. Unskilled workers are easily and quickly replaced leading to a lack of connection, communication, and socialization among employees of the company.

In essence, these main HR strategies cultivate a sense of belonging in the company, especially with the higher wage rates, and a sense of cohesion and stability. Companies need consistency in order to enable growth within employees and growth of the company itself. When there are too many people coming and going into the company, it erases any chance for employees to bond leading to constant changes and decreased productivity.

2. The recruitment and selection process can have a serious impact on the turnover rates and cohesion of an organization. Researchers have found a direct correlation between the ability of an organization to recruit worthwhile candidates and the organization's ability to retain and hire employees. When a company has more tenured employees, it allows that organization to have less structure and control and grants more freedom to the people of the organization. When a company or organization has an effective and solid recruitment and selection process, the chances of hiring the right employees for the right job are higher, leading to an overall best fit for the organizational structure, lesser turnover rates, more stability in the organization or company, and overall improved productivity.

When a company is small, recruitment and selection are typically left to the hiring manager. However, in bigger companies or organizations, recruiters are enlisted to screen resumes as well as conduct initial interviews, passing the most qualified of applicants to the hiring manager who then conducts the final interview and makes the hiring decision. By retaining good employees, there is a correlative reduction in turnover and the need to constantly recruit, select, and hire new employees decreases.

While some companies rely on non-intuitive practices for recruitment and selection, a 2014 qualitative study noted the desire for the recruitment and selection process to include intuition-based decision making. "Intuition was used an indicator for performance, personality and person-environment fit. Intuition tended to be used with requisite caution; participants were aware of its limits, the potential for bias and the difficulties in justifying its use; several participants used their intuitions in concert with more structured, non-intuition based approaches" (Miles and Sadler-Smith, 2014, p. 606). Sometimes people make their decisions based on how their feel lending to the notion that what 'doesn't feel right' may not be right for the company or organization. Either intuition-based decision making could be helping or hurting the recruitment and selection process because it may rely on things that cannot be easily assessed or quantified. This study makes reveals an interesting notion that based on how someone 'feels' about someone, they may or may not hire them.

3. Recruitment and selection process can have their limitations. Even if someone performs all the necessary procedures and assesses the prospective employee to their best of the ability, trying to screen out any 'bad eggs', there are always going to be problems in the screening process. This is because as humans, recruiters have limits to how well they can perceive and analyze a person and situation, leading to hiring bad employees and making errors. The previous qualitative study shared how sometimes recruiters can rely on their 'intuition' to help in their decision making.

In a 2013 Harvard Business School article, Anna Secino examines the phenomenon of businesses and organizations hiring unqualified candidates or 'fundamental attribution error'. What fundamental attribution error is, is when a person makes an instant assessment of someone or something, attributing an individual's behavior to inborn characteristics instead of external circumstances. This kind of assessment happens so often because no one can know every aspect of a stranger's backstory while also needing to make a decision whether that individual is friend or foe. Therefore, surface cues like an expensive suit or a high GPA will sometimes be enough to make a snap judgment and decision.

This means that such decisions can spell trouble for an organization/company wanting to find quality recruits. Because easy tasks that are done well are examined, excluding difficult tasks that are done somewhat well, when recruits are selected and given difficult tasks, their performance ability diminishes, leading to a downturn in performance and productivity. " ... consistently favored employees whose performance had benefitted from the easier situation -- can be disastrous on a companywide scale. When executives promote employees based primarily on their performance in a specific environment, a drop in that employee's success can be expected under different conditions" (Secino, 2013).

4. The recruitment and selection process can be transformed into an easier task by including certain theories to help in the screening and decision-making process. MAUT or multiattribute utility theory has been used due to MAUT methodology being based on preference assumptions characterized by classes of utility models under an assumed valid SEU framework (Edwards, 1992, p. 74). However, because there is strong indication in contradiction of the descriptive validity of SEU theory, it may have some parts that are invalid assuming strategies involving MAUT analysis are SEU-based, leading to the use of MAUT in conjunction with other approaches like constraint-based approaches. "Pareto and constraint-based approaches could be used as part of a successful decision process; but a tradeoff-based approach, like multiattribute utility theory, is required to identify the true best system in all but a few special cases" (Merrick, Morrice and Butler, 2015, p. 238). This shows that while one theory can help in the decision-making process, several approaches need to be combined in order to reach the end goal of selecting a worthwhile candidate for the company/organization.

Understanding the theoretical process of decision-making is an integral part of the recruitment and selection process. What is also important is understanding the recruitment and selection process itself and the various steps one has to undertake to hire qualified candidate.

1. The first step recognizing the need to determine whether a vacancy exists and if there is a need to recruit.

2. Updating job profiles, specification, and descriptions are imperative in order to get the right kind of candidate interested in applying.

3. Determining key performance areas for the recruitment planning/job help narrow the pool of candidates to those that are qualified versus unqualified.

4. Consulting the recruitment procedure and policy allows the recruiter to understand the objectives of the company along with what is expected of the potential employee and the overall process of recruiting.

5. Considering the sources of recruitment, which involves searching places where qualified candidates may be located.

6. Electing the suitable recruitment approach leads to effective recruiting.

7. Development of a recruitment strategy/advertisement to get candidates interested.

8. Placing advertisement in the most suitable and appropriate communication medium allows for fast and extensive access to worthwhile candidates.

9. Guaranteeing availability of application blanks and allowing enough time for responses.

10. Screening responses so unqualified candidates' resumes are discarded.

11. Recruitment control and assessment leading to a streamlined conclusion to the overall process (Kumar, 2011).

Knowing these steps ensures less errors and better selection of qualified candidates, decreasing time spent on unqualified candidates as well as reducing waste of company resources.

5. Aside from the plethora of research available to help in understanding the R&S process, the consensus appears to be that recruitment is an important way for a company to retain skilled and qualified employees, improve work productivity, and decrease turnover rates. While steps and theories sometimes differ in interpretation, many agree that certain steps are needed in order to remove potentially bad employees from the company and hiring those that will aid the company in the long run create a stable and productive work environment. That includes identifying what is needed to attract worthwhile candidates, and properly assessing qualified candidates from unqualified.

3) Research / Focused Question (Hypotheses)

In this qualitative study, information will be gathered several ways. The first is through interviewing Managers and Human Resources. This part will include a series of ten questions aimed at identifying if there is cohesion and collaboration among managers and HR or is there a disconnect. These questions will also help identify what they assume makes for a qualified prospective employee and what does not. By identifying this, examination of their evaluation methods can commence. Below are the questions.

1. How does the recruitment selection process help contribute to improving turnover rates in the company?

2. Is the structure of the company being kept in mind when recruiting and selecting candidates?

3. Are recruitment posts created aligned to the HR Plan?

4. What is the company's HR Plan?

5. Does the company have job descriptions per class of occupation?

6. Are job descriptions regularly updated?

7. Do job descriptions inform and contribute to the overall requirements of the company?

8. How are candidates assessed, as in what makes them qualified or unqualified?

9. What attributes make up a qualified candidate?

10. Which sources do you use to look for prospective employees?

These interview questions were taken from the recruitment and selection process identified in the literature review. These questions provide good indications of the kind of recruiting taken place, the efficacy of the selection process, and the desired outcomes. Most of the questions were altered in order to provide a further exploration or flushing out of additional information from participants providing responses. While these questions are the standard form, they can be modified to suit the individual collection needs of a particular participant group.

These questions can and will be tailored so they can be sent out to the various people in the company that work both in management and the human resources department. They will be sent via email and provided with a website link where they will add their responses to an online survey that collects the answers of all the participants. The questions can be sent to one person initially like the head of HR in order to determine the appropriateness of the questions and then approved to have sent to the rest of the participants.

While this survey identifies the recruitment and selection process for the company, the 'exit interview forms' will help identify the reason for the high turnover rates as well as several other things like lack of communication or potential lack of communication in the company, if there are any long-term employees in the company, and so forth. The exit interview questions are below.

1. How many employees have worked with the company for more than 5 years?

2. How do employees communicate with HR and management?

3. Do you feel there is lack of communication among those working for the company?

4. Are there company-based activities for employees to get a chance to know each other and discuss things?

5. Why do you feel the turnover rate for those working in the company is so high?

6. Is there a disconnect between HR and management?

7. What are the goals of HR and what are the goals of management when it comes to recruitment and selection?

8. Do you feel there is adequate training of management or HR staff?

From there, the answers will be analyzed and those that answer will be given instructions. They must fill out their gender, their length of time working for the company, and if they feel comfortable, the first letter of their first name.

In short, these surveys are meant to provide an adequate understanding of the company's process and what may be causing the disruption in stability seen through high turnover rates. The hypothesis will be focused on expressing the inherent lack of communication among HR and management that results in increased turnover rates and incapability with processes that keep the recruitment and selection process from being effective in hiring qualified employees. The hypotheses are as follows:

1) Departments managers seek, interview, select and then request HR only to finalize the hiring of the candidates.

2) Managers are not trained to undergo the recruitment & selection of candidates.

3) HR are not involved in recruitment & selection, and have no say in the process.

4) High Staff turnover.

5) Managers believe they are selecting the right candidates but HR are not supporting, HR believe that managers are not hiring the right candidates.

4) Research Approach / Strategy (Methodology)

This will be a qualitative study. While there will be some quantitative aspects like gender, number of participants, and so forth, most of the information collected will be qualitative in nature. That is because there is a desire to seek answers to questions through collection of evidence that produces evidence beyond immediate boundaries of the study. The answers needed for the hypotheses are complex textual descriptions that cannot be interpreted entirely through numbers or statistics. Qualitative methods help identify intangible factors like gender roles and intuitive-based reasoning that cannot be quantified.

While quantitative research methods have their place in studies, they are meant to show concrete evidence of an answer via a quantifiable aspect. Qualitative and quantitative research methods diverge mainly in their kinds of questions posed, forms of data produced, degree of flexibility constructed into the study design, and analytical objectives. Qualitative describes variation whereas quantitative quantifies variation. The question format for qualitative studies are open-ended. For quantitative studies they are closed-ended. The data format or qualitative is textual and for quantitative it is numerical (Bernard, 2013, p. 46). Since the study requires both an open ended survey and interview, these fit into the realm of qualitative research methods not quantitative.