Recruitment

This is the second step in the staffing process. This process starts when a company finds it needs to hire more employees.
Recruitment concerns the set of activities that an organization uses to attract job candidates who have the abilities and skills needed to assist the organization in the achievement of its goals. Recruitment can either be general or specific. General recruitment is directed at filling positions that frequently open up in most organizations e.g. clerical or non-skilled or semi-skilled workers. Specific recruitment is mainly for managerial positions and for professional positions such as engineers and other skilled workers.

Sources of Recruitment

Recruitment sources are either internal or external.
Internal recruitment involves recruitment from within the organization through for example job postings or promotions. Internal recruitment has several advantages:

•    It reduces excessive recruitment and placement costs;
•    promotes improved morale and loyalty among employees because they believe their performance will be rewarded with promotions;
•    generates internal competition for higher level positions which leads to increased performance;
•    when managers promote from within they deal with people whose qualities they already know;

Recruitment from within also has several disadvantages:

•    internal candidates may lack sufficient experience, knowledge, management ability, intelligence or skill in dealing with people;
•    promotions from within may lead to in-breeding—an enterprise may tend to stagnate if all managers share the same views and experience. Bringing in new managers with different backgrounds can result in new ideas and new approaches;
•    may create internal disharmony, this happens where there are many internal managers qualified for the job but in the end only one has to be selected.
•    the Peter principle—managers are promoted until they reach their level of incompetence. If a manager proves successful in one level he may keep being promoted to higher levels until he cannot perform well.

External Recruitment is used extensively for highly specialised positions for which personnel in the organization are unqualified, where an organization may be expanding too rapidly to develop an adequate supply of managerial talent and when management wants to give the enterprise a new vigorous orientation. The sources of external recruitment may include walk-ins and unsolicited resumes from individuals, agencies and placement firms, newspaper advertisements, schools and colleges, unions and professional associations.

Advantages of outside recruitment include:

•    the selection can be made from a much greater number of people.
•    it brings individuals into the organization who have different backgrounds and who   can perhaps help the enterprise maintain vitality.
•    outside recruitment is used to give an organization a totally new direction.

Disadvantages of outside recruitment may include:

•    the individual selected will lack specific experience in how the organizations functions and how the various departments interrelate.
•    it costs more in terms of both money and time, for instance fees may have to be paid for advertisements and for professional recruitment firms and besides it may take weeks to locate the truly qualified manager.
•    some adverse qualities of a person recruited from outside may go undetected despite a thorough investigation—for example how on earth can the recruitment manager tell that the candidate has a bad temper?