STAFFING: RECRUITMENT, SELECTION, PLACEMENT, AND RETENTION

Staffing: Recruitment, Selection, Placement, and Retention



Staffing: Recruitment, Selection, Placement, and Retention

Introduction

Recruitment, as a human resource management function, is one of the activities that influence most critically the performance of an organisation. While it is understood that poor recruitment affects organisational performance and limits goal achievements, it is crucial to identify and implement adequate hiring strategies. This paper defines the recruitment process and compares strategies that organisations apply to ensure the best choice of qualified applicants.

Recruitment strategies and processes

Recruitment may be made internally through the promotion and transfer of existing personnel or through referrals, by current staff members, of friends and family members. Where internal recruitment is the method of filling vacancies, job openings can be advertised by job posting, which is, a strategy of placing notices on manual and electronic bulletin boards, in company newsletters and through office memoranda.

Internal recruitment does not always produce the number or quality of personnel needed; in this case, the organisation needs to recruit from external sources, either by advertising vacancies in newspapers, magazines and journals, and the visual and/or audio media; using employment agencies to “head hunt”; advertising on-line via the Internet; or through job fairs and the use of college recruitment.

Staffing

Generally staffing issues in an international setting involve filling critical management positions. Obviously, almost all employees at the middle management and more operative levels are always recruited locally. When sometimes candidates for upper management posts are being recruited, there are then various options to choose whether from parent-country nationals or host-country nationals or third-country nationals. The ultimate choice however definitely depends on the attitude of top management at the parent organisation. The attitudes can be divided into three categories; Ethnocentricity, Polycentricity, and Geocentricity. With respect to quality, top management must continuously weigh professional managerial skills and technical competence against contextual or environmental adaptiveness. Therefore, the ability to adapt to local cultures is a crucial factor, involving not only the management candidate himself, but also his or her partner and family as well.

Posting Vacancies

As said earlier, job posting refers to publicising an open job to employees (often by literally posting it on bulletin boards) and listing its attributes, such as criteria of knowledge, qualification, skill and experience. The purpose of posting vacancies is to bring to the attention of all interested persons (inside or out of the organisation) the jobs that are to be filled.

Recruiting from external sources

External recruiting methods can be divided into two classes: informal and formal. Informal recruiting methods enter a smaller market than formal methods. These methods may include rehiring former employees and choosing from among those applicants whose unsolicited résumés had been saved on file. The use of referrals also belongs to an informal hiring method. Because they are relatively inexpensive to use and can be implemented quickly. Former students for instance who participated in internship programmes may also be easily and cheaply accessed.

Formal methods of external recruiting are searching the labour market more widely for candidates with no previous connection to ...