Human_Resource_Management

Human Resources Management—Recruiting and Selecting XIN ZHAO ELP, Level 820 Robyn Conners 09/22/09 Human Resources Management—Recruiting and Selecting Human resource management is a term focused on developing and maintaining organizations’ human capitals which are the most important resources of organizations. If companies can give the right person the right position for which they are best suited to do the right thing more effectively at the right time, these companies will be successful and sustainable in the fierce competitive market. When globalization is undergoing a rapid development, organizations find that it is not easy to hire satisfied employees, and that it is more difficult to find outstanding talents who fit organizations’ strategies and business market. However, only depending on training employees to be top-ranking staff cannot solve the problem of a shortage of skilled labor. First ensure that the employees companies decide to hire have already possessed superb qualities. Since the results of training the employees are very limited no matter how remarkable the training is and how much money organizations spend on training. How dare you want to teach a chicken how to fly' The best way is to have a bird directly for the purpose of saving more money and energy. More and more companies pay more attention on recruiting smart staff, redesigning the job descriptions and salary components to attract more talents. Organizations should have clear notions, approaches, strategies, and complete recruitment systems to bring in real stars. The development of the recruitment The role of people was neglected for a period of time because of the application of science and technology on management. Newell, J. and Swain, A. asserted in their book, The professional recruiter’s handbook that it was only in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when the demand of employee increased dramatically in the United Kingdom where major changes in agriculture, manufacturing, mining, and transport had a profound effect on the socioeconomic and cultural conditions. (2009) These changes in many fields stimulated the need of employees. According Wikipedia in Industrial Revolution explained that part of Great Britain’s manual labour and draft-animal–based economy transited to machine-based manufacturing. During about 70 years, the changes spread from Europe to North America and then to the whole world. (n.d.) Because of the huge need of capable workers, headhunting as a way of recruitment appeared. The recruitment company can be traced back to 1870s. John Gabbitas and Thring founded the first recruitment company aimed to provide teaching staff in 1873. The company is still alive as Gabbitas Educational Consultants. Then many other recruitment companies with the same mode emerged such as Alfred Marks setting up his solid recruitment brand in 1919, Fred Winslow forming his Engineering Agency in 1893, and Katharine Felton finding problems in staffing construction programs after the San Francisco earthquake in 1906. (Newell & Swain, 2009) There is much more opportunity for employers to hire highly qualified individuals offsetting the bulk of demand. In this process, the emergence of recruitment industry occurred. The importance of recruiting and selecting Businesses need a rare and core resource in a universal ever-increasingly competitive market to ensure survived and success of organizations. Pogorzelski, S., Harriott, J. & Hardy, D. said in their book, Finding keepers: The Monster guide to hiring and holding the world's best employees that this resource is more valuable and crucial than any other resource of an organization and can be found in every company. Without this resource, people in charge of a company could do nothing to result the growth of the company. The resource is human capital. (2008) Regardless of the size of companies, leaders still spend a big amount of money to attract talents and make them work happy in the environment employers created. Ideally, two persons’ productivity will be the same doing the same job under the same circumstance. However, it varies in reality. Some personnel perform better than others. Cook, M., indicated in his book, Personnel selection: Adding value through people that Judiesch and Schmidt conducted research on SDp, the standard deviation of employee value in pounds, dollars, or euros. They found that the output of the best workers was twice as many as the worst. (2009) The funniest thing is that the good workers get the same salary equal to the poor workers. Imagine being a leader and in front of you are two candidates, the performance of one of whom is much better than the other. Which one do you prefer to bring to your company' The answer is obvious. The high-performing employees, who possess the skills, expertise, experience, and personal characteristics that fit companies’ strategies, mean higher profits and growth. The most important thing in business is hiring the right person and placing them in right positions to do the right things. According to Peter Drucker in the book, Best practices. Hiring people: Recruit and keep the brightest stars said “No organization can do better than the people it has.” (cited in Shwiff, 9 2007) Getting the right people and giving them enough space to create, they will bring more to organizations. According Wikipedia in Human Resources claimed that the hiring process at the very beginning is extremely essential to an enterprise’s economic well-being either in the short or long run. (n.d.) The specialists of human resources management should figure out how to bring the best employees in. The Engagement Cycle between employer and candidate illustrates the essence of recruitment. (Pogorzelski, Harriott & Hardy, 2008) Before making decisions, it must be clear in mind that recruitment follows the fixed procedure—attracting top performers, selecting and interviewing, and evaluating the performance of applicants. (Finding keepers: The Monster guide to hiring and holding the world's best employees Pogorzelski, Harriott & Hardy 31 2008) Attracting the top performers HR professionals can make a decision on which candidate should be chose unless they attract the top applicants first. Selectors should keep in mind the view that what they are looking for and what characteristics of applicants they are concerned with. Good hiring starts with a well-organized and clear-defined job analysis and job description. Muller, M. explained in his book, The Manager’s guide to HR that job analysis, useful and more detailed, is the process of identifying the job duties, qualifications, and the relationship with other departments. Information about job is eligible from reviewing existing job description, reviewing public source and job classification, and asking the people who have been doing the job. (2009) Then write down a job description with the information gathered from previous process. A good job description should cover context as follows: the title of the position, a summary statement, duties, tasks, physical requirements, and details of working hours and salary ranges. (Shwiff, 2007) Only clear and well-structured job descriptions can attract the best employees. Once organizations have known what kind of person they want to hire, it is time to release the news of hiring. There are many techniques to attract a large amount of qualified candidates. Incumbents are a constant resource for current job vacancies. Because they have already known how the organization is operated, possessed the working expertise and got used to the working condition of the organization. The message can be published through the internal organization during a meeting or posted on billboards. (Muller, 2009) The disadvantage of internal job posting is that the source of applicants is limited and the process of recruiting will probably arouse internal conflicts among colleagues. Kennedy-Luczak, K. and Thompson, C.E. stated in their book, HR how-to--recruiting & hiring: Everything you need to know about recruiting and hiring new employees that other methods of enlarging external sources are newspaper advertising, job fairs, internet job boards, and college recruiting. (2004) Since the applicants pool is so large, the employers can find out the variety sorts of candidates with different personalities and pick up the one they need. It is a popular way to attract external talents. But it also has drawbacks that the new employees who were hired from external sources need time to adapt to new companies. Selecting and Interviewing When the organization has decided to move on to the recruiting process and released the news of job openings, the post boxes or e-mail boxes of HR departments will probably be flooded with resumes and application forms. Companies will screen and assess the candidates to narrow the pool of applicants it wishes to interview. To properly and efficiently select candidates, HR professionals should follow a process for assessing applicants. Reviewing resumes, finding out which candidate is suited for the position, and determining which one should be selected moving onto the next stage—interviewing is an important step in the review process. (Shwiff, 2007) The selectors should ensure that all things include both positive and negative aspects are considered to pick up the candidates. When evaluating resumes, look for positive indicators such as checking for experience, identifying transferable skills, noting ability that cannot be trained. (Kennedy, K. & Thompson, C.E., 2004) And decide whether the skills, character, and knowledge that the applicants possess match the requirements of job description. But resumes show just what candidates want you to know, the selectors should keep an eye on gaps in employment, overlaps in employment, frequency of job changes, logical inconsistencies, non-descriptive job titles or statement of job duties, and reasons for leaving past employment and take note of “red flags” if necessary. (Muller, 2009) Once the recruiters have selecting the candidates they wish to interview, it is sometimes inevitable that the number of candidates exceeds the required number. When this happens, telephone screening might be a good choice to interview candidates briefly on telephone so as to reduce the number of candidates. In case of deciding to use telerecruiting, keep in mind of identifying the target market and establishing a phone list, using a script to record the process of interviewing, and preparing to take notes on a piece of paper. (Kennedy, K. & Thompson, C.E., 2004) Another approach aims to cut down the number of applicants is pre-employment testing. Although the majority of HR staff have a great many resume analysis experience, it is inevitable to make some mistakes resulting in suitable candidates out of the door at the very beginning. Following are some common mistakes which can remind the recruiters, in order to enhance the selecting ability. First, much blind faith in the big company’s working experience is an big mistake. They believe that the applicant who worked in a big company will bring in good experience and resources with seniority of previous working experience and a far-flung network of clients. In fact, not all of the employees who have worked in large company before are elites. The strict management and the meticulous work division of labor will sometimes wear down a person's creativity and passion, what will not be fit for the position the company posted. In addition, the implied details included in a resume are often ignored by selectors during the selecting procedure. A resume, including details of many aspects, is found to be questionable by smart recruiters from gaps in employment. Although the doubtful points are not necessarily negative information, selectors should know that why an applicant didn’t work for a period of time and why the person changed jobs frequently. It is an old-fashioned view that people were judged to be trustless persons if they switched jobs frequently. People can move to wherever he or she wants. If you pay much loyalty to your company, there is no reason for them to treat you in the same way as you treated them. (Muller, 2009) In such cases, recruiters should give candidates an opportunity to explain. If analysis is reasonable, employers should quit prejudice against these candidates. Grasping the key point, the selecting of candidates can be successfully fulfilled. Consequently, the important step is interviewing. No matter how the interview is conducted, going after a procedure is essential. Herein lies a bid significance when a large scale of consultants are involved in the question of which one they should choose, since structured interviews, treating everyone equally, is a more effective way of interviewing. Before you announce candidates to come for an interview at the table, you should make a plan on an actual interview process and decide what aspects should be involved in your interview process. When preparing to interview, you need to define the qualifications of the job into questions as objectively as possible, devise job-related questions, and determine the date and time, length, location, rounds of the interview, and the number of candidates you wish to hire. (Muller, 2009) There are many types of interview plans and structures. Which one you should choose depends on your own decision. Different types of interviews aim to evaluate different kinds of candidates. You should choose the one so as to take everything into account. The following are some of the most common forms of interviews. Behavioral interviews Behavioral interviews are a kind of structured interviews that applicants need to describe the work of job they done in the past. The recruiters gather the information of the candidates’ past in order to predict the future performances of the candidates. Problem-solving interviews Problem-solving interviews are a kind of unstructured interview that applicants should present solutions of concrete problems, aiming to view candidates’ abilities of analysis and creativity. Case interviews Applicants are given large volume cases in this process. They need to summarize the cases or even take presentations of the analytic results within two hours. The recruiters want to assess the candidates’ abilities of gathering information and summarizing. Stress interviews Interviewers will create an unfriendly atmosphere and difficulties to applicants deliberately in order to evaluate whether the applicants possess positive attitudes toward working. Which interviewing approach should be used depend on the company’s economic nature, scope of business, mode of operation. Sometimes the interviewers can use more than one approach to censor the applicants. Interviewers should make sure that the questions they ask are proper without stereotyping and discrimination and write down what they are thinking about the applicants they are interviewing. Evaluating the performance of applicants Evaluating candidates is necessary at the moment of first contact or even after this moment. It is possible that HR specialists are reluctant to obtain their resume before applicants make phone calls to companies. Nevertheless, recruiters should assess applicants according to a series of rules and regulations which they formulated based on the requirements of the business market, when they got his/her CV, or that applicant coming to see them face to face. When the interviews are done, the interviewers need to compare the candidates among the large pool. In order to properly evaluate the applicants, recruiters should follow a strategic plan for making final decisions. According to Yeung, R., stated in his book, Successful interviewing and recruitment that the first step is making a marking frame, which should include a set of marking guidelines and behaviors that are related to requirements of jobs, a list of the behaviors for each competency, and a rating scale, to rate candidates. (2008) After that, recruiters should score the abilities of all candidates and compute their average score. Here is an inflexible decision-making process. The beginning of making a decision is to list the scores of candidates on to a “decision matrix”. The table bellowed is an example of decision matrix scored on a 6-point scale. (Yeung, 2008) The first raw is the competencies that the recruiters think the employee should take on. The numbers in each cell are the scores the applicants get based on their performance. Candidate name | Hilary Ashmore | Larissa Petros | Alex Chung | Planning and organizing | 5 | 4 | 5 | Teamworking | 3 | 4 | 4 | Communication skills | 5 | 3 | 3 | (Successful interviewing and recruitment Yeung 136 2008) This table must be designed before the interviews to avoid recruiters setting hurdles on their own propensities. Once interviewers should make choices among candidates who have similar mean scores, they should choose “all-round” versus “spiky” candidates. Candidate name | Alan Lewis | Tola Adejumo | Thinking analytically | 3 | 6 | Planning and organizing | 5 | 1 | Handling customers | 4 | 5 | Average scores | 4 | 4 | (Successful interviewing and recruitment Yeung 138 2008) What can be seen from this table is that Alan is an all-round candidate, while Tola is a spiky candidate. Which one should be chosen depends on which ability is more essential to this job. Then bring all materials together to make a final decision. The sources include job description, resumes, notes took during the interviews, test results, and any other information needed to take into account to assess the candidates. (Yeung, 2008) The recruiters should evaluate aspirations and motivations, review contractual obligations organizations have, and check background of candidates to prevent decisions offending laws and regulations. The last work needed in the recruiting process is sending either offers or rejections to candidates. Make sure that you make decisions after full considerations; organizations spend a lot of manpower, physical resources, and money on recruitment. Conclusion Undoubtedly, human resource management is essential in every field of every organization. Human resource is the most valuable resource of all kinds of resource human beings have. It has become a core source of modern management. To attract high-leveled talents has never been so difficult. As the economy is witnessing an ever-accelerated growth and the competition of talents has become more and more drastic, hiring the best employees have turned to be a matter of prime importance in enterprises. As a result, usage of some plans or strategies becomes increasingly important during the recruiting process. Recruiting and selecting applicants is a very significant work. Like two persons meeting each other and falling in love, before making the decision to get married, each one should evaluate whether the person they love is the one they want to live together with. Recruitment is in a similar situation. Interviewers should assess whether the applicants possess the abilities they want. Professionals have invented techniques and strategies on how to attract the best employees who will make more contributions to the organizations. A good job description, an attractive job advertisement, a well-considered screening method to narrow the pool, a well-structured interview that make sure everything is taken into account, a perfect evaluating system, all of these makes good recruiting. In short, setting up a mutual respect and recognition of the values as a bridge between talents and organizations is an effective approach of mutual promotion and common development that human beings can become sources used by society. References Cook, M. (2009). Personnel selection: Adding value through people(5th ed.). MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Human resources. (n.d.) Wikipedia, a free encyclopedia.Retrived September 10, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_resources Industrial Revolution. (n.d.) Wikipedia, a free encyclopedia.Retrived September 10, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution Kennedy-Luczak, K. & Thompson, C.E. (2004) HR how-to--recruiting & hiring: Everything you need to know about recruiting and hiring new employees. Chicago, Il: CCH Inc. Muller, M. (2009). The Manager's guide to HR: Hiring, firing, performance evaluations, documentation, benefits, and everything else you need to know. New York, NY: AMACOM. Newell, J. & Swan, A. (2009). The Professional recruiter’s handbook. Philadelphia, PA: Kogan Page. Pogorzelski, S., Harriott, J. & Hardy, D. (2008). Finding keepers: The Monster guide to hiring and holding the world's best employees. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill. Shwiff, K. (2007). Best practices. Hiring people: Recruit and keep the brightest stars. New York, NY: Collins. Yeung, R. (2008). Successful interviewing and recruitment. London ; Philadelphia, PA: Kogan Page