Human Resource Planning & Recruitment Strategies

Human Resource Planning & Recruitment Strategies

Human Resource Planning & Recruitment Strategies

Introduction

Recruitment is typically defined as activities engaged in by an organization with the purpose of attracting potential employees. Internal recruitment refers to the processes used to attract current employees to apply for job openings in the firm (Bowen, 2001). External recruitment refers to the processes involved in attracting individuals who are not currently employed by the firm to job openings in the firm. In general, however, the term recruitment is used to describe external recruitment, which involves the processes of identifying and attracting applicants for open positions, keeping the applicants interested in the position and the organization, and ultimately turning the applicants into employees (Cable, 2001). Much of the recruitment research on which our current knowledge is based has examined larger firms. Although evidence indicates that larger firms are somewhat more formal and bureaucratic in their recruitment than smaller firms, it seems likely that many of the findings, which are based on larger firms, are applicable to smaller firms.

Influences on Recruitment Procedures

Recruitment is influenced by and influences other human resource management and career development practices used by firms. The first step in recruitment is identifying potential sources of applicants. However, before a firm can identify potential sources, the firm needs to have conducted a job analysis, which provides information about important attributes needed by employees to perform the job successfully. Information about such attributes influences sources used to advertise the position and to attract candidates. For example, firms may use different sources to attract secretarial support staff versus chief financial officers. The recruitment process, which involves attracting applicants, is conducted concurrently with the selection process, which involves evaluating the suitability of the applicant for the position. Thus firms need to balance the processes used to “sell” the firm to applicants with the processes used to evaluate the fit of the applicant to the firm (Barber, 2004).

Organizational staffing is concerned with having the right people at the right place and time to achieve organizational outcomes. Staffing is a complex, multifaceted process that affects all areas of the organization but is particularly important with regard to organizational effectiveness (Breaugh, 2004). As such, the organization strives to attract, motivate, and retain a workforce with the appropriate characteristics to achieve the organization's mission, strategy, goals, and objectives. Viewing staffing as a continuous process rather than a discrete event (e.g., hiring a particular individual) is an essential component of virtually all contemporary staffing models and conceptualizations. Staffing includes recruitment, selection, employment, and retention and is strongly affected by numerous laws and external conditions that bear directly on organizational employment processes (Phillips, 2004).

Staffing strategy flows from the organization's mission, strategic plan, goals, and objectives that, in turn, influence human resource planning efforts. Human resource plans are developed for the organization as a whole and, in larger organizations, for each business unit. From the staffing perspective, the human resource plan examines an organization's demand for labor and the current labor ...