Best Practices in HR Recruitment and Training Programs

Introduction

An organization's strength is based on the quality of its employees, an aspect that places high relevance on human resource departments and the practices they employ (Ume, 2008). MSCG's consultancy concerns target directing clients toward adopting best practices in their recruitment processes. This will guarantee the recruitment of ideal candidates, professionalism in HR practices, employee and talent retention, and optimal deployment of the workforce (Loosemore, 2003).

The human resource function plays a critically important role in organizations. Human resources are by far the most important asset an organization can possess, provided it selects appropriate persons. Throughout a company's existence, its employees continually change. Based on the employee turnover rate, the human resource manager will engage in staffing functions from time to time. The effectiveness and efficiency of the hiring process directly impacts the level of employee turnover. When hiring policies are inadequate, the company incurs substantial costs in terms of wasted time and money as new trainees are recruited, selected, and trained for the job. Accordingly, an inadequate recruitment and hiring policy leads to wasted resources (Belcourt, 2006). To reduce such waste, it is important for a company to develop a hiring policy that is cost-effective. As Rioux and Bernthal note, the effectiveness of a hiring strategy determines a company's ability to recruit and retain qualified employees.

Resourcing and Development

Every company desires to achieve consistently better results. This can only be accomplished by having the required manpower to complete upcoming and scheduled organizational missions. Employee resourcing ensures that a company has appropriately skilled people. The aim of a resourcing strategy is to ensure that the organization identifies its employee needs both now and in the future, and attempts to meet them through internal and external recruitment as well as employee development (Loosemore, Dainty, & Lingard, 2003). Employee resourcing falls under human resource planning capacity. With effective management, employee resourcing can help a company achieve organizational flexibility by ensuring access to a full range of skills that can be utilized for longer-term strategic planning and rapid response to emerging problems and opportunities. Employee resourcing can also help achieve job satisfaction, employee development, and career management (Yakubovich & Lup, 2006). Employee resourcing is concerned with many activities beyond recruitment and selection; it addresses numerous areas that ensure an institution meets its needs for specific skills and behaviors.

The success of an organization is highly dependent on the quality of its workforce. To obtain the most qualified employees, organizations have recently adopted recruitment and selection strategies that are useful, cost-effective, and easy to align with overall organizational strategy. One such strategy is employee outsourcing (Fey, Morgulis-Yakushev, Hyeon Jeong, & Björkman, 2009). This entails contracting the services of an appropriate recruitment and selection company to provide these services while the organization concentrates on other areas of its operations. For a small company, cutting costs is important if the firm is to remain competitive in the highly volatile software development business. Thus, the outsourcing strategy is the most cost-effective approach for optimal hiring (Fey et al., 2009).

Cost-Effective Recruitment and Selection Strategies

Beyond freeing the company's human resource function to handle other HR responsibilities, the firm offering outsourcing services is typically an experienced organization that has devoted its resources entirely to this task. Thus, the chances of making a misjudgment in finding an employee for a given position are considerably reduced. Moreover, competition in this growing industry has helped ensure that the cost of acquiring these services remains reasonable and affordable. However, this strategy cannot be effective if the firm does not provide maximum support to the service provider. It calls for the active participation of the HR department across a number of areas (Richter & Henning, 2010).

The role of such a strategy is to enhance an organization's ability to hire and retain qualified employees. The recruitment process also needs to attract only competent candidates — neither overqualified nor underqualified. Reducing cost is crucial, and the human resource manager bears responsibility for designing and ensuring the implementation of such a strategy. For the process to be cost-effective, it must highlight the importance of a clear job analysis and specification. The current job market is filled with job seekers, and an unclear job specification can generate an unmanageable volume of applications. To avoid this, the firm, through its human resource department, will engage in a rigorous exercise aimed at identifying job requirements in detail. For instance, in filling a current vacancy, specifications on age may be appropriate where the firm requires young software engineers. A detailed job analysis helps job seekers quickly identify whether they are suited for the advertised position. It also helps interviewers gauge the degree to which a candidate fits the role. Therefore, the first step in this strategy is to provide a detailed description of each job or vacant position, identifying the job design and evaluation criteria. By doing so, the firm will be able to anticipate probable future roles and candidate profiles, avoiding wastage of time in establishing such requirements.

Since the recruitment process can draw candidates from within or outside the organization, the strategy will incorporate employee participation. As noted by Kolodinsky, Madden, Zisk, and Henkel (2010), employee involvement carries significant benefits. First, employees have firsthand experience of the job and understand the type of skills required. They are therefore able to describe the job in more concrete, job-related terms that will attract qualified candidates while discouraging underqualified applicants. Second, employee involvement in the selection process helps identify overqualified candidates who may become dissatisfied soon after employment and leave — either voluntarily or involuntarily — thereby increasing turnover. Third, employees can identify potentially qualified candidates, reducing the administrative burden of recruitment. This approach will be applied to certain technical posts, where employees will be permitted to recommend candidates based on their professional networks.

Some of the tasks the firm's HR department will undertake to promote efficient recruitment include determining remunerations in advance for each role, as well as recording and storing particulars of job positions, employment equity policies, and selection criteria (Richardson). The issue of remuneration is especially important, since many qualified candidates decline job offers due to unsatisfactory compensation (Bernthal). To assist the outsourcing service provider in producing a manageable shortlist of qualified candidates, the HR department will maintain ongoing communication with the firm, offering guidance on areas such as organizational culture and values (Evans et al., 2007). This is because the right candidate is one who is likely to be comfortable and to integrate well with the culture of the firm. Such assistance will include the participation of HR officials in some interviewing sessions to ensure the process is conducted in a manner most likely to yield the desired outcome.

There are a number of studies that support the outsourcing of recruitment and selection services. According to Belcourt (2006), this service plays a very important role in determining the quality of a firm's workforce. Deciding to outsource these services may therefore lead to higher work quality due to the expertise of the service provider. Outsourcing recruitment and selection also expands the firm's resource base, consistent with the resource-based view of the firm. Furthermore, this strategy is strongly linked to cost reduction, as it lowers expenses such as training costs and advertising costs. Ume (2008) notes that this strategy has benefited several firms considerably, but warns that it must be coupled with other HR strategies to prevent a firm from losing its internal competence and capacity to innovate. If management does not monitor the process closely, some aspects of organizational need may be overlooked. Thus, the HR manager will remain closely involved in implementation to ensure that the needs of each position and of the organization as a whole are considered.

One company that has used this strategy to reduce hiring costs while improving workforce quality is Ford. It used the services of The Outsourced Training Company to maximize on available talent in the resource market. This approach allowed the firm to secure the best workforce while eliminating the administrative burden of processing large volumes of applications. Another example is M&G Investments, which reduced hiring costs by outsourcing through Origin HR. The managers of these firms assert that this strategy is highly beneficial, suggesting it is an appropriate model for adoption in a software firm (Belcourt, 2006). Richter and Henning (2010) further support the recruitment outsourcing strategy, noting that it reduces the cost per hire, shortens the time taken to fill vacant positions, and provides access to effective hiring technology without requiring additional capital investment. The efficiency of the outsourcing strategy encompasses the entire process, from job profiling through to the onboarding and training of new employees. Given the sensitivity of current job positions in software development, outsourcing will play a major role in ensuring that the young software engineers hired are well suited to both the role and the organization (Kolodinsky et al., 2010).

Conclusion

In reducing the cost of hiring, firms are now outsourcing this service to more competent and specialized organizations. This strategy will help the firm reduce the number of job finalists interviewed for a position, thereby reducing the time and financial resources spent on the hiring process. Moreover, outsourcing leads to the hiring of the right persons, increasing work quality and reducing employee turnover to the firm's advantage. This strategy not only enables quick, cost-efficient hiring for current and future vacancies, but also opens the software firm to strategic business alliances. Since recruitment and selection outsourcing firms use specialized software to screen and assess candidates, the competent employees hired through this process may also contribute to the development of such software, which can subsequently be made available to the firm at a subsidized rate.