Blog 11 - Recruitment

Recruitment “includes those practices ad activates carried out by the organisation with the primary purpose of identifying and attracting potential employees” (Torrington et al., 2011, p.158)

There are over a million people who are recruited by an employer in the UK each year, so the process is clearly a very well-practiced one. But this still doesn’t mean it can be done wrong.

There are several stages of recruitment, and several different paths that can be taken to create a different recruitment process. However, firstly in any stage of process is the process of determining the vacancy. Without knowing what type of service you want to be done, finding someone who can do this service well will become even more challenging.

Not all tasks that need to be completed however require a new staff member to be recruited, and often it is cheaper and more efficient to adapt your current workers or alternate options to perform the task. Such as, reorganising the workload, use of overtime, mechanise the work, stagger the hours, make the job part time, subcontract the work, or use an agency.

If it is seen appropriate to employ another member of staff, then it is important that the next stages are done correctly in order to get the best person to fill the position. A job description is a great way to set out the main aspect of what is needed to be done, and can be used as a form of advertising the job, making sure you only get the correct people applying for the job.

A job description can be a long detailed piece or short and to the point. Including subheadings including context, job summary’s, job content and even performance standards. BY having this document, the employer can determine the type of person they need to employ to full fill the job role, and can advertise the job in the relevant ways; Whether this be in a hop window, in a newspaper, or online.

The advertising of a job online is becoming an increasingly more popular way of finding an employee. Many organisations have their own websites, with recruitment sections within them, so all job opportunities within the organisation can be seen. Since this increase in online use by the UK population and even the global population specific website have been created to only contain job adverts that people can use to find employment.

Some webpages look specifically at certain types of jobs, for example the website prospects focuses on graduate jobs (PROSPECTS, 2012). Therefore is an organisation is looking for an long time employee to work their way up an organisation or an employee to fill a graduate scheme place, then this would be the ideal place to advertise for it.

Within the website of prospect not only is there the search option for jobs, but also option to help with CV’s , and interview techniques, down to student lifestyle tips. This therefore will increase the success rate of the applicant it they take on this advice, making it a positive web page to use.

One thing within the site which makes it stand out over others such as fish4jobs, is the ability to search for work experience, and to be able to contact organisations. This allows students to know the requirements that organisations have for when they come to the stage of graduation, and by gaining work experience before they graduate, increase their ability to be employed, as experience in their chosen fields is as important as the education standard.

Another option that the site provides is looking at employment outside the UK, and the world is becoming increasingly globalised, having experience within different countries and cultures is becoming increasingly important as we are becoming increasingly interconnected. By having this search option the website is showing there increasing ability to show a wide range of opportunities within the world and by doing this makes the webpage very useful.

The option of having a username and password allows the user to customise their service to receive alerts when new opportunities become available in the sector they are looking at, and so making the information received more relevant.

To advertising a job opportunity the increased use of technology have allowed the process of using e-recruitment campaigns to come into practice. “ E-requirement is the use of information communication technology to conduct aspect of employee recruitment and selection including advertising jobs facilitating application, online testing and shortlisting” (Wilton, 2011)

This way, people can keep in contact with each other, and it increases the waiting time for both employer and applicant. The use of online tests during the application process is another newer aspect to the way people employ. By doing either character or scenario tests a company can see how someone will work within there current team and as to how people would react to situations.

A campaign which many people took notice of was McDonalds (Mcdonalds, 2012).  McDonalds use of Tv advertising about its staff members set a higher standard of employee, and the job or crew member went from being a last bid attempt at gaining some money to a sought after employment opportunity. Especially with the introduction of the McDonalds qualifications and their introduction to increasing progression through the company to becoming restaurant managers made people more interested in the organisation.

The recruitment process is all based around an online application. All the McDonalds jobs are advertised online, and are subject to their location in the country. They also have a process of having job alerts sent to your e-mail, so you can see when a position becomes available in a certain area that you select.

The application process allows you to create a profile, and so you don’t have to re-fill in your details each time you apply for a job, and as a result save time. Each time you apply however you have to fill in a scenario test, and select out of a multiple choice options what you would do in the proposed scenario. For example, if it was busy and people were complaining what would you do? Followed by four answers to pick from.

This allows both the employer to see what people are like and whether they fit the characteristics required for the job title, but also to give the applicant the opportunity to see the sort of scenarios they will have to deal with, and allow them to see whether or not  that their skills and character traits will suit the role.  

The applications are then looked over, and the top applicants are chosen to have an interview. The interviews are arranged via E-mail, showing the vast range of technology used during the recruitment process.

 Tests that are used in order to gain information about peoples characteristics have both positive and negative aspects to them. By having a test to gain personality, you can gain an idea as to what someone is like, and as a result see whether they would suite the job role. On the other hand tests could give incorrect or inaccurate results about a person’s personality type. For example if gaging what someone would do in a certain scenario, people could try to pick what they think is right, rather than what they would actually do. Making them seem more suited to the job role than they are. Or a test could make someone out to having a poor unfavourable personality, but this could be due to the test inaccurately analysing the answers given.  

SHL Direct (SHLdirect, 2012) is a web based company which give advice on these types of recruitments tests, and give you the opportunity to do practice tests, for which I completed a couple of. I completed a full long verbal test and a numeracy one. For which I found results to vary. Both tests were very lengthy and caused me to become slightly board when completing them, and so this is one aspect to the amount of time I spent one each question. Also some of the questions were hard to understand, and as a result of being just online, was more difficult to clarify than if you were talking to a real human being. The assessments can take up to half an hour to complete and took between 5-10 minutes to load; this may put people off applying.

Therefore overall to conclude it is clear that there are many benefits to having the developed use of technology in order to enhance the recruitment process. However, on the other hand, some tests can give a poor judge of character, or analyse parts of the character that are not job specific, making the applicant process harder and allowing the employer to miss out on potential employees. As a result it is important that both technology and human contact are used in order to recruited a new employee, as people could give answers that are seen to be “right” when they may not actually follow this in real life, or the challenge of the technological use may be out of reach for some users, who could not be technologically advance but could be great at another skill.

Bibliography

Handy, C. (1995) Gods of Management. The Changing work of organisaitons ed. Oxford : Oxford university Press.

Mcdonalds (2012) Mcdonalds Recruitment [online]. Mcdonalds. Available from: http://www.mcdonaldsrecruitment.co.uk [Accessed: 21st March 2012].

Mulins, L.J. (2002) Management and Organisational Behaviour. Sixth Edition ed. Essex: Financial Times Pitman Publishing Imprint.

Mullins, L.J. (2007) Management and organisational behaviour. 9th ed. Harlow: Prentice Hall FT.

PROSPECTS (2012) Prospects Home [online]. Prospects. Available from: http://www.prospects.ac.uk [Accessed: 21st March 2012].

SHLdirect (2012) Shldirect [online]. SHLdirect assesment page. Available from: http://www.shldirect.com/practice_tests.html [Accessed: 21st march 2012].

Torrington, D., Hall, L., Taylor, S. and Atkinson, C. (2011) Human Resource Mangement. 8th ed. Harlow: Pearsons Education Limited.

Wilton, N. (2011) an introduction to human resource managment. 1st ed. London: SAGE publications.