Recruitment in HRM

What is Recruitment (R) in HRM; Recruitment is another important function in Human Resource management. Simply the R means, the process of identifying and attracting a suitable staff to the organization. In this chapter, we discuss this R function briefly, including the Definition of recruitment, its importance, and the process.

Key highlights

• Definition of Recruitment
• Importance of R
• The R process
• Types of R

Definition of Recruitment

Recruitment refers to the process of identifying and attracting suitably qualified people to apply for a particular employment. Basically, it is a function that relates to job seekers as well as the job offers.

Mathis & Jackson defined recruitment as a process of generating a pool of qualified applicants for organizational jobs.

According to the Decenzo and Robbins recruitment is the process of discovering the potential for actual or anticipated organizational vacancies.

 Importance of Recruitment

The recruitment function is so important to the organization in many ways. So this function plays a vital role in Human Resource management

• The organization will able to acquire a pool of suitably qualified job seekers.
• Efficiency and effectiveness increases
• The quality of the product or service will increase because of the suitable pool of people.
• Easy to conduct further Training & Development programs
• The quality of human resources depends on the successful performance of recruitment.

Recruitment Process

When it comes to the Recruitment process, mainly there are 7 steps including identify job vacancies, determine job requirements, consider factors affecting R, prepare a job application form, & select the methods of R, implementing, and finally evaluating. Let’s discuss each step in this process.

Identify job vacancies

As the first step in the Recruitment Process, the entity needs to clarify what type of employees they need for employment. By using Human Resource Planning they identify present and future vacancies (by analyzing employee demand & supply). Also, some types of vacancies to be filled for a particular period of time.

In addition to that, sometimes an organization needs employees because of special requests made by departments or unit managers, due to unexpected resignations, deaths or retirements, etc.

Determine job requirements

After identifying job vacancies, the entity needs to ascertain the job requirements of those identified job vacancies. Job requirements mean some special job characteristics, required qualifications or qualities to be posed by the needed person to perform the employment.

Some jobs need special requirements and some other jobs don’t need any special requirements. Therefore determining job requirements is a must for preparing the right recruitment message.

Consider factors affecting Recruitment

There are several factors that affect the recruitment process. The factors include organization R policies, cost, employee market condition, type of needed employees, and the time constraint.

The organization’s R policy can be divided into two ways such as internal R policy and external R policy. An internal recruitment policy refers to acquiring candidates to fill job vacancies within the organization and the external recruitment policy means acquiring candidates to fill job vacancies from outside of the organization.

When doing this R process, the HR managers need to consider the cost. Because they have to do this process under a certain budget. The cost that incurs in attracting people is the influence on the R function.

Also when doing the recruitment process, the entity needs to consider employee market conditions. It is very difficult to hiring people when there is a strong economy and, with a weak economy, there will be a surplus of applicants.

The organization needs a different type of employees to operate business functions (finance, operations, marketing, R&D, HRM). So this will affect the scope of the recruitment effort.

Prepare job application form

The job application form is prepared by the organization to collect related information about job applicants in a formal way.

By the way, this step may not apply to all types of jobs. Because most of the time the job application forms are prepared by the job applicants and also application form is one of the methods of selecting the suitable person for the organization. Therefore it should be prepared carefully. The main aspects of a job application form are The required information, Arrangements, and Filling.

how to prepare a job application

Select the method or methods of R

Mainly, R methods can be represented as internal recruitment methods and external recruitment methods. Organizations use one of these methods or both methods to acquire a pool of suitable people for the organization.

Some internal Recruitment methods are as follows

• Notifying job vacancies on org; notice boards

• Organization magazines

• News letters

• Skill & management inventories

• Intranet

• Succession plans

And also the external recruitment methods can be represented as follows

• Advertising

• Internet

• Trade unions

• Employee referrals

• Pre- applicants

• Past employees

• Educational institutions

• Employment agencies

• Executive search firms

Implementation

In this step, all of the decisions which took in the above steps are implemented. It means, identifying job vacancies, determining job requirements, considering factors, selecting appropriate methods are implemented in this step.

Evaluation

After all steps, the success of the R process can be decided in this step. By evaluating the R process, the entity will able to collect the following details.

• The ratio of qualified recruits and unqualified recruits

• The cost per recruiter

• Number of recruiter per method

• The number of recruiters within a particular duration.

Summary

• R refers to the process of identifying and attracting suitably qualified people to apply for a particular employment. Basically, it is a function that relates to job seekers as well as the job offers.

• The recruitment function is so important to the organization in many ways. So this function plays a vital role in Human Resource management by acquiring a pool of qualified people for the organization.

• There are 7 steps in the R process including identify job vacancies, determine job requirements, consider factors affecting R, prepare a job application form, & select the methods of R, implementing, and finally evaluating.

• Organization R policies, cost, employee market condition, type of needed employees, and the time constraint are the factors that affect the R process.

• Organizations use internal R methods as well as external R methods to acquire job applicants.