Recruitment – Definition, Process, Need and Purpose

People are integral part of any organization today. No organization can run without its human resources. In today’s highly complex and competitive situation, choice of right person at the right place has far reaching implications for an organization’s functioning. Employee well selected and well placed would not only contribute to the efficient running of the organization but offer significant potential for future replacement. Recruitment comes at this point of time in the picture. Recruitment is a strategic function for HR department.

Recruitment means to estimate the available vacancies and to make suitable arrangements for their selection and appointment. Recruitment is understood as the process of searching for and obtaining applicants for the jobs, from among whom the right people can be selected.

A formal definition states, “It is the process of finding and attracting capable applicants for the employment. The process begins when new recruits are sought and ends when their applicants are submitted. The result is a pool of applicants from which new employees are selected”.

In this, the available vacancies are given wide publicity and suitable candidates are encouraged to submit applications so as to have a pool of eligible candidates for scientific selection.

In recruitment, information is collected from interested candidates. For this different source such as newspaper advertisement, employment exchanges, internal promotion, etc. are used.

In the recruitment process, a pool of eligible and interested candidates is created for selection of most suitable candidates. Recruitment represents the first contact that a company makes with potential employees

Definitions of Recruitment by Different Authors

According to Yoder “ Recruitment is a process to discover the sources of manpower to meet the requirements of the staffing schedule and to employ effective measures for attracting that manpower in adequate numbers to facilitate effective selection of an efficient working force.”
According to Edwin Flippo, “Recruitment is the process of searching for prospective employees and stimulating them to apply for jobs in the organization.”

Steps Involved in Recruitment Process

In the recruitment process, job analysis is the first stage within the organizations. It is very important to gather data about the whole situation of organization positions’ nature and structure. The principle to check whether the structure is eligibility is the ‘fit’. Is the job fit this person or is that person fit the organization? How about the employee performance and records? The answers of those questions should be found out within the job analysis.

This period involved data collection and materials retrial, such as employee performance appraisal and records, and so on. Job holders records is a vital factor should be concerned as well. Job holder could use interviews, structures questionnaires, diaries to record their activities and get information in order to gain validity job analysis. Considering the reports form colleagues is another approach within the job analysis. So those three aspects underlay job analysis in the first stage of recruitment in organizations.

Next stage is job description, person specification. Firstly, the function of job description gives the applicants or recruitment agencies an orientation about the organizations’ needs. Once the applicants and recruitment agencies knew the orientation, the staff will design the employment contracts and begin to prepare the selection techniques to ensure next stage’s normal operation. And the other benefit of job description for the recruitment process is to provide the applicants a fairly condition without the recruiters’ subjective bias.

Once the job analysis phase is finished and job description and person specification are identified, the next stage is to consider how to attract people who meet the requirement and to manage application. There are two methods to be chosen: one is internal method, the other one is external method.

Internal methods meaning that pay more attention to the internal talent pool within the organization when recruiting. This method provides opportunities for development and career progression increases employee engagement and retention and supports succession planning. This methods bring several advantages to the organization. Firstly, using this method could economize time and cost of money and labor. Because the practice of recruitment takes place within the organization, the recruits already know some context of organization’s culture and the responsibility of the job so the briefing and training before starting work would be reduced or cancelled. In addition, the cost of advertisement and recruitment consultancy fees could be avoided as well, so that is why it saves time and cost. Secondly, providing opportunity to existing employees could embrave then to obtain better performance and get more motivation when doing task. So using the internal recruitment methods could develop the organization’s own internal talents pool and then realize the win-win situation (employee-organization), sequentially causes the long-term stable development of an organization. It also has disadvantages by using this method. It is unfair to the applicants outside. Internal recruitment is therefore less common in the public sector, where concerns about discrimination tend to be a higher priority than in the private sector. In addition, recruit person without outside could make the organization become obturation and stagnancy without now ideas and innovation’ coming. Because new person could bring the now thought to make organization’s change, and change means development.

If an organization considers expanding the dimension of organization or the internal recruitment failed, the external method could be operated effectively. The external method means that recruit individuals from outside. The merit and demerit of external method is the contrary side of the merit and demerit of internal method. There are several options available for external recruitment. To attract more individuals and increase the applicants pool, external assistance, such as job centers, ‘head-hunters’, employment agencies, professional bodies, career service, always be used. There are a number of corporation uses formal personal contacts to attract individuals, such as career fairs, open days and leaflet drops. Notice board, accessible by current staff or the general public, to be used by recruitment; the advertisement, including local and national press, specialist publications, radio and TV and the Internet, published by organizations as well.

Need for Recruitment

Every Company in the world knows the important of recruitment step in increasing the performance of the company and increasing the productivity of the products. In this part of the project we will mention some important point about the importance of recruitment step in any organization:

It helps organization by found of the need of requirements by job analysis activities and personnel planning.
To collect many of job candidates with less cost.
It helps to organize application by divided them by under qualified or overqualified, to increase the possibility of increasing and choosing the success person to the right place.
Employing new and better qualified staff often the only effective long-term strategy for improving operational performance.
Capabilities and commitment of employees ensure an organisation’s success.
Raise organizational and individual value in the short term and long term.

Purpose and Importance of Recruitment

Determine the present and future requirements of the organization on conjunction with its personnel planning and job analysis activities.
Increase the pool of job candidates at minimum cost.
Help increase the success rate of the selection process by reducing the number of visibly under qualified or overqualified job applicants.
Help reduce the probability that job applicants, once recruited and selected, will leave the organization only after a short period of time.
Meet the organization’s legal and social obligations regarding the composition of its work force.
Begin identifying and preparing potential job applicants who will be appropriate candidates.
Increase organizational and individual effectiveness in the short term and long term.
Evaluate the effectiveness of various recruiting techniques and sources for all types of job applicants.

Difference Between Recruitment and Selection

We know that recruitment and selection are part from the same phases of employment, each one is complete the other but there are five points different between them:

Recruitment is the first part of the employment phase, which is looking and collecting more than one applicant, the second part of the employment phase is selection which start to look for applicants and evaluate them.
The goal of Recruitment is to create the differentiation and creativity applicants to give the organization more options. The main goal for selection is to choose the best one to fill the position.
Since recruitment searching for more employees to apply for a position, it is consider as a positive process, and the negative process will be in selection since is reducing the applicants to one for each position.
The source of human resources is most important part to recruitment, but in selection the most important part is choosing the person via interviews or through tests.
There no contract between applicant and organization in recruitment process, but there is an signing a contract between an applicant and organization.

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