QUALITY PAPER!!! GRADUATE PAPER SEE ADDITIONAL ADDED DOCS

REFERENCE: Lussier, R. N., & Hendon, J. R. (2019). Human resource management functions, applications, and skill development. Los Angeles: SAGE.

The Recruiting Process

The total costs associated with recruiting, selecting, and training new employees often add up to as much as 300% to 400% of their annual salary according to a new series of estimates.1, 2, 3 Recruiting is important for many businesses,4 but for Amazon in 2015, they were hiring at a rate of almost 40,000 people per quarter. And this doesn’t even count seasonal workers they expected to hire for the Christmas holiday season—about another 100,000 people.”5

LO 5-1

Identify and discuss the primary goal of the recruiting process and the major external forces acting on recruiting.

After HR managers have determined our hiring needs through the forecasting process, and after we have done job analyses (providing job descriptions and job specifications), we begin the talent acquisition process: we will need to recruit the correct numbers and types of people to fill our job openings, and then select from the recruit pool. So the actual first step in matching employees to jobs is recruiting. We can’t select and hire good employees without effectively recruiting them.6

But what are we attempting to do when we begin recruiting? We are either trying to get people inside the company to apply for different job openings, or we are trying to get outsiders to join the company. In this section, you will learn about the recruiting process.

So what is the main goal of recruiting? Do we want to reach a huge pool of potential applicants on the Internet who want to join the organization, or do we want to find just a couple of skilled people who can do the job—in other words, discriminate in detail among reasonably qualified applicants? Well, it varies. If you think about it for just a minute, you will see that if you find too many applicants, it costs the organization too much to go through the selection process. On the other hand, if you find too few, there is no selection process, and you don’t have the option to find the individual who best fits in the position and the organization.

Typically, a good rule of thumb might be to find about 15 to 25 people who want to be a part of the organization for each opening. That’s just a rule of thumb, but it is probably going to allow us a reasonable applicant pool. You can then cut that applicant pool to four or five pretty quickly, and that is a reasonable number of people from whom to choose your next employee. You certainly don’t want a massive number of recruits because it is too time-consuming and it costs the company too much to cull that number to a usable pool. However, you may get more or fewer applicants than you want if you don’t target your recruiting correctly.

Recruiting The process of creating a reasonable pool of qualified candidates for a job opening

Defining the Process

Recruiting is the process of creating a reasonable pool of qualified candidates for a job opening. Notice that this definition identifies the fact that we need qualified applicants.7 In a recent study, 84% of HR professional reported candidates having “applied skill deficits (such as problem-solving skills)” and 68% were having difficulty in filling jobs.8 Recruiting does us no good if the candidates whom we attract are not qualified to do the work. One of the most critical things that you have to do in the recruiting process is to determine very early on whether the individuals who are recruited are qualified. Thus, a good job analysis, including an up-to-date job description and specification, is helpful to the company and to the people looking for jobs because it helps everyone involved to know whether a given candidate is a match for a given job opening.

To fill an opening, potential job candidates must generally be made aware that the organization is seeking employees. They must then be persuaded to apply for the jobs. In HR recruiting, we want to use a series of tools to show the candidates why they might want to become a part of the organization. We will discuss these tools as we go through the remainder of this chapter.

External Forces Acting on Recruiting Efforts

First, though, we want to identify the forces that affect our ability to successfully recruit new employees. A series of external forces affect our ability to recruit individuals into our organization at a particular point in time.9 One factor is the general shape of national and world economies. During the 2008–2009 recession, 63% of HR executives said recruiting was cut back in their organizations.10 In 2009, 48% of HR executives also had to manage layoffs; but by 2017, many if not most employers were becoming significantly concerned with “employee retention” and requirements for new hires.11Also, legal and regulatory changes such as the Affordable Care Act have had at least some effect on the hiring of part-time and temporary workers instead of full-time employees.12 As noted in Chapter 4, the proportion of contingent workers such as consultants and independent contractors has increased from around 7% in 2013 to approximately 25% in early 2017. Among the firms shifting away from full-time employment in 2013, 38% said the shift had occurred, in part, due to implementation of the Affordable Care Act.13

SHRM

I:2

External Influences on Staffing: Labor Markets, Unions, Economic Conditions, Technology

Think about what is happening around you right now. Is the unemployment rate high or low? Are there government incentives to increase hiring of the unemployed, or is government doing very little to increase employment? Is the available supply of people with advanced skills very large, or are there not enough people with high-level skill sets available to companies? All of these things affect your ability to recruit new workers into your company.

Generally, the external forces acting on recruiting fall into two large categories: the available labor market and the social and legal environment. Let’s take a quick look at each.

The Labor Market

The availability of talent to fill our needs depends on several items in the labor market.14 The labor market is the external pool of candidates from which we draw our recruits.

Supply and demand and the unemployment rate

First, we must consider the supply and demand factors in a particular category of jobs. If we are in need of a mechanical engineer, how many mechanical engineers are available in the labor environment? Are there too many for the available number of jobs, or are there more jobs than engineers? If there is a large pool of engineers desiring a job in their field, then our job of recruiting one will be significantly easier than if there are very few available and lots of job openings.

This issue of supply and demand usually ties in directly with the unemployment rate in an area.15 Every business recruits primarily from an identifiable geographic area. Some will recruit locally (perhaps within a metropolitan area or a single city). Others will recruit regionally or nationally, while still others may recruit internationally. We need to identify our recruiting area and then determine what the unemployment rate is in that area. If unemployment is high, the job of recruiting is generally easier than if unemployment is very low. However, even when the unemployment rate in the United States was around 10% in 2010 and 2011 and there were thousands of people looking for jobs, there was still a shortage of qualified candidates for some highly skilled jobs.16

Labor market The external pool of candidates from which we draw our recruits

Generational factors in the labor force

Generational changes are creating new challenges for recruiting professionals. The millennial generation is now the largest group in the US workforce along with the workforce in most EU nations. However, most companies will have at least four distinct generations in their workforce at the same time: baby boomers (1946-1964); Gen X or the baby busters (1965-1979); Gen Y or the Millennials (1980-1994); and just the beginning of Gen Z or the iGeneration (1995- ).17,18 Each generation has different ways of working. Millennials tend to work better when working in a collaborative environment while the newest Gen Z workers want their own space and their own goals.19 In order for recruiters to be successful, they will need to approach individuals from these different generations in different ways. (See the Trends and Issues section for more detail on attracting the Millennial and Gen Z labor force.)

Competitors

We also have to consider our competitors and how much they contend with us for the available talent in a particular field. If competition is very strong for available technical talent such as mechanical engineers—for instance, if there are a significant number of competitors and each competitor needs a large number of engineers—then it will be a more difficult recruiting environment.20 Similarly, if there aren’t many competitors who need a particular type of mechanical engineer and are working to attract such applicants to their business, then the recruiting environment will likely be much less difficult. So our recruiting environment depends on the labor market and on our competitors.

Work Application 5-1

Select one of your jobs and discuss the supply and demand issues (the unemployment rate and competition between employers) that had an effect on your job search.

Social and Legal Environment

The social environment in the country in which we are operating also affects our ability to recruit new people into our organizations.21 Today, people put more weight on “me time,” job satisfaction, and the ability to move up in the organization than they did in past years. As a result, workers look at the social environment in the organization to make decisions concerning whether or not to apply for a job there. In many cases, new employees also expect a high level of benefits and good opportunities for training and development.22 As a result, the social environment drives our ability to recruit our 21st century workforce.

We also have to take into account the various laws that limit the ways in which we can recruit. First and most obviously, we have to abide by all of the EEO laws that we discussed in Chapter 3, and we must avoid any issues of discrimination in our recruiting efforts. So, this is another area in which we could apply the OUCH test to ensure fairness and equity in our processes. There are also laws in some situations that limit our ability to lure employees away from competitor firms. These antipoaching and “wage-fixing” laws significantly limit ability to attract talent from competitor companies in some industries.23 In other cases, labor agreements may limit our ability to recruit, or the union itself may be able to place limits on our ability to recruit from outside of the union’s ranks. We may also choose to recruit more part-timers due to the costs involved with the Affordable Care Act. In addition, noncompete agreements might not allow us to recruit certain individuals who are bound by such agreements. State laws might also apply to recruiting in certain industries or to recruiting certain types of employees. HR managers must therefore be well versed in the various laws, agreements, and regulations that in any way limit their ability to recruit.

LO 5-2

Briefly discuss the main items we need to consider before recruiting.

Organizational Recruiting Considerations

Once we become aware of the limitations that are placed on us by the labor market and the legal environment, we can start to consider the internal issues that control our recruiting processes. When should we go through the recruiting process, what alternatives do we have to recruiting (outsourcing, retraining, etc.), and should we recruit our applicants from internal sources (within the company) or external sources? We have to set policies on these topics in order to maintain consistency, and we need consistency in order to be fair and equitable and so that we can defend our processes if it becomes necessary. So, what do we have to think about, and in what level of detail?

What Policies to Set

We have to think about a lot of things as we work to allay a shortage of people within the company. We need to determine how we are going to go through the recruiting process before we start trying to recruit new members into our workforce. Among other things, we have to answer the following questions:

· Under what conditions will we recruit new people into the company?

· What alternatives do we have, and when will we use them?

· Should we recruit locally, regionally, nationally, or globally?

· How should we incorporate technology in recruiting efforts?

· Are we going to recruit from within our own ranks first, or go outside the organization?

· What primary recruiting sources will provide us with the best recruits for our company?

We have to make these determinations based on our particular company circumstances, taking into account all of the information from our forecasting processes. Let’s discuss four of the primary items we will need to think about before the recruiting process starts.

Work Application 5-2

Select a future job (preferably after graduation) and describe your social expectations when job searching. What type of organization do you want to work for? Also, will there be any legal restrictions on your job search?

When to Recruit

The answer seems obvious: We recruit when we need someone to fill a job. But it’s not that simple. We don’t necessarily have to recruit someone when we need a job filled. Remember what we said in Chapter 4. There are all kinds of ways to mitigate a worker shortage in the organization, and the option we choose depends on a bunch of different factors. Should we recruit or bring in temps or other contingent workers? Should we add overtime or outsource some tasks? We need to identify the points at which we would generally go through the process of starting and carrying out a recruitment campaign, because the campaign itself is expensive. We don’t want to go through a long recruiting process and then figure out that we didn’t need to—if we did, we would just be wasting money.24

Alternatives to Recruitment

Do we have a viable and financially feasible way to solve our shortage other than through recruitment? Is the alternative less expensive or better for our circumstances in some other way? We don’t want to recruit new employees into the organization if working a group of people overtime for a week or two, or even a month or two, will solve our problem. We may be prohibited from recruiting because of an attrition policy or a hiring freeze. We might be able to solve our problem with temporary employees instead of new full-time workers.

We have to weigh all of the available options, and we should generally have a policy that tells us when we would use each option. We need to know what the primary objectives of the organization are so that we can analyze the possibility of outsourcing (we don’t want to outsource a critical task).25We also need to know how much overtime is currently being used so that we can know whether we are working our current employees to the point where their job satisfaction is likely to start going down.26

Before deciding to recruit new full-time employees, managers might consider giving current employees overtime or hiring contingent workers.

©iStockphoto.com/vgajic

What kind of labor market does our industry and company face right now? If we are in a market where there are many people out of work, we may be able to get a much better new hire right now, so it might be best to recruit for new employees. Conversely, if we are in a tight labor market, we might waste a lot of resources trying to recruit new employees because we might end up getting no good candidates. We need to analyze each of the options for mitigating a labor shortage other than making new hires, and we need to create a policy concerning when each of these options is useful in our organization. We have to take all factors that we know into account in making our recruiting decision.

Reach of the Recruiting Effort

We also need to identify our effective labor market. Do we plan to recruit only from local sources? Should we consider people all over a particular region (e.g., the mid-South or New England)? Do we need to recruit globally or even internationally?27 Again, the answer is, “It depends.”

What factors are involved with our decision? The first factor is simple: Can we find the right number and types of employees if we recruit locally? If so, then we may be able to work only in our local labor market. If not, we may be forced to recruit from a broader pool of talent. Secondly, can we get better talent to apply if we recruit regionally, nationally, or globally?28 Additionally, do we need this type of talent in order to accomplish our organizational goals? (Remember, if we are a low-cost producer, we may not want top-notch talent in all areas of our company.) Is the job that we are recruiting for so specialized that we need to recruit from all over the world? Do we want to recruit from locations far away from our organization if we don’t have to? Of course not. It is time-consuming and expensive to bring people to the organization from far away. So we expand our geographic recruiting area only when we need to. However, remember that multinational corporations tend to hire locally, but many of their total number of employees are from other countries.

Social Media and the Technology Recruiting Revolution

More and more, companies are targeting recruiting efforts to very specific candidates with exacting requirements. The only way we have good reach into the appropriate labor market in such cases is by using technology and specific online platforms to look for the few candidates who match our needs.

Many firms are heavily using social media sites, including LinkedIn and Facebook, to assist with their recruiting efforts. These social media sites can provide recruiters with much more ability to reach specific individuals with detailed skill sets than they had in the past.29 However, this reach may bring with it some significant issues for the business—such as having to pore over hundreds or even thousands of résumés in response to a job opening, or being taken to court over what someone sees as a written promise that a job will have certain characteristics. Wagner v. Home Depot is an example of a case in which the plaintiff sued the organization for false promises of stable long-term employment.30 So how do you get the value of social media without exacerbating the problems that it can cause? You have to understand social media’s reach and use it selectively, whether you’re a job seeker or a recruiter.31

In a recruiting situation, social media provides the company with a number of valuable services. As mentioned, it provides a reach that the company may not get with other means such as advertising in local newspapers or on radio or television. For example, in May 2017, Facebook had more than 1.9 billion monthly active users (nearly 2 of every 7 people on earth!), meaning it gives recruiters a huge reach into the global labor market.32 And especially in higher-level job recruiting, where there will be few individuals with the necessary skills, social media job sites like Indeed (200 million unique visitors per month in 2017), Jobvite, Monster.com, and now Google Jobs, can get our message out to a much larger group of potential candidates across the country or even around the world.33 The online research and networking opportunities provided by such sites give the recruiter information on job candidates, in many cases before they are even directly contacted.

Social media sites like can also provide the candidate with information on our company values and culture, which is critical information in attracting Millennials and Gen Zers.34 Corporate profile information, also known as corporate branding, can help individuals make a better decision concerning whether or not they would be comfortable in our organization, which in turn lowers the possibility that they will take the job and then cost us extra money because they end up leaving within a few weeks or months. And even though Facebook is primarily a personal networking site, company recruiters can use software programs like Monster.com’s BeKnown that provide them with the ability to directly target and recruit new employees on Facebook.35

Recruiters are also beginning to heavily use Artificial Intelligence (AI) and other smart technology recruiting tools in their jobs. Chatbots to follow up with active candidates, schedulers for setting appointments, search programs that look for and query passive candidates about interest in open positions, and other tools now take care of many routine tasks for the recruiter. Programs like Mya from Firstjob,36 Olivia by Recruiting.ai,37 and RAI from HiringSolved,38 will continue to take over many of the common tasks in recruiter interactions with candidates and applicants.

Work Application 5-3

Select a future job (preferably after graduation) and state the geographic area in which you will apply for jobs.

One of the major selling points besides the fact that these programs save significant amounts of recruiter time is that AI can make better decisions than human recruiters because of the lack of bias.39 However, most of the companies selling this software also note that AI programs are only as good as their programming.40 Companies will need to be aware of the danger of disparate impact due to biased inputs into the systems. Validity, especially, will need to be continually analyzed to insure that we are not inadvertently harming protected groups because of utilizing skewed inputs. Recall that in Chapter 4 we discussed the fact that Googlers are known to be dog lovers, and that an early attempt to identify candidates for employment there used this fact to determine who would fit with the company. However, that fact would not have validity, so the question was ultimately deleted. Claims for AI are that they reduce bias, but that is not necessarily so. Computers certainly get rid of emotional responses to candidates, but if biased inputs are used to configure the AI, bias will also result in the system’s outcomes. Keeping the OUCH Test in mind—especially the four-fifths rule to measure for Consistency in Effect—will allow companies to monitor validity and reliability of these systems

So are there other problems with technology-based and social media recruiting? Yes, and some of them are significant dangers to the company. For instance, there is the potential for discrimination through disparate treatment of individuals because of information posted on their Facebook or LinkedIn sites or on their Twitter feed.41 A Carnegie Mellon University study found that candidates who identified themselves as Muslim on their Facebook profiles “were less likely to be called for interviews than [were] Christian applicants.”42 Pictures can also potentially identify individuals as members of a protected class, and those pictures may cause subconscious bias on the part of some recruiters. Any bias, whether intentional or unintentional, is a danger to the organization during the recruiting and hiring process.

Finally, because we are more narrowly targeting searches than has historically been the case, there is also the potential for “gold-plating,” or creating massive and complex requirements in a job specification. Ironically, one example comes from the CEO of LinkedIn, Jeff Weiner. He noted that when his company first identified the need for a data center manager, its initial (large) list of criteria for acceptable candidates was analyzed and the company “found only seven identifiable people on Earth who met all of the conditions.”43 Once management relaxed the requirements by getting rid of some that were really not required, they quickly found 126 potential candidates. There is some evidence that this process of creating a massive catalog of qualifications that a firm would like to have but that is really not necessary is one reason companies believe they are experiencing a shortage of “qualified” employees. So we have to be careful to identify only necessary information and candidate characteristics when recruiting via social media to avoid unnecessary problems.

Internal or External Recruiting?

What is our policy going to be concerning recruitment from our current pool of employees? We can very rarely just say that we will “promote from within” and stick to that policy. So we have to create policies concerning when and how we will recruit from our current employee pool and when we will go outside the organization. Why? Probably the biggest reason is so that our employees perceive fairness in our recruiting policies.44

LO 5-3

Discuss the major advantages and disadvantages of both internal and external recruiting.

If we say we will recruit from within and then go outside the organization to recruit a new manager, many of our employees will begin to think that we were “just talking” when we said we would promote internally; and they might begin to show less loyalty to the organization because they feel that the organization failed to show them loyalty. However, if our policies say that we will go outside for recruits when it is unlikely that anyone in the organization would have the skill set necessary to do the job identified in our job specification, then we can provide a legitimate answer to someone who questions our recruiting process.

Work Application 5-4

Select an organization you work or have worked for and give an example of either an open, targeted, or closed recruiting method it uses. List the job(s) that method was used to recruit for.

Additionally, we might have a policy that says that when we are instituting new processes or when we have identified significant resistance to change as an issue in a section of the organization, we will bring in new people with new ideas and different skills. We may also identify specific occupations in our organization that will typically be recruited from outside, usually due to the need for a specialized skill set (e.g., nuclear plant operator, corporate attorney, emergency medical technician). It is unlikely that we would promote from within to these types of positions.

These are just some of the things that we need to consider as we create our recruiting policies. Now, let’s take a closer look at internal versus external recruiting efforts and the advantages and disadvantages of each approach.

Internal Recruiting

Internal recruiting involves filling job openings with current employees or people the employees know. Here we will discuss internal recruitingsources, promotability ratings and managerial sponsorship, and the advantages and disadvantages of internal recruiting.

Internal Recruiting Sources

There are two common types of internal recruiting:

· Promotions from within. Many organizations post job openings on physical or electronic bulletin boards, in company newsletters, and so on. Current employees may apply or bid for the open positions. Hilton Worldwide is one company that works hard to promote its internal hiring practices.45 Moves today are frequently lateral rather than in the form of promotions.

· Employee referrals. Employees may be encouraged to refer friends and relatives for positions. Jobvite notes that about 40% of its client-company new hires are from existing employee referrals.46 For hard-to-recruit-for jobs, some firms pay a bonus to employees when their referred applicant is hired.47

Open, Targeted, or Closed Recruiting?

When it comes to promotion from within as an internal recruiting method, the organization has several options. We can use open, targeted, or closed recruiting methods.48 Open recruiting consists of advertising the job openly within the organization, and anyone who meets the qualifications can apply for the job opening.

Internal recruiting Filling job openings with current employees or people the employees know

Targeted recruiting is pretty much what it sounds like. We do not openly advertise the position internally. Instead, we ask managers to privately nominate workers who they feel would be able to do the job that needs to be filled. HR will then evaluate the candidates put forward by the managers and then forward the list of the best candidates to the hiring manager. We have to be more careful with targeted recruiting because it can allow or appear to allow bias in the recruiting and selection process.

SHRM

I:4

Internal Recruitment: Timing, Open/Closed/Targeted Recruitment, Bona Fide Seniority Systems

Finally, closed recruiting occurs when hiring managers have a need to fill a position and they communicate that need to HR. HR recruiters will then search the organization’s files for people who have the requisite skills and qualifications and send a list of such individuals to the hiring manager. The hiring manager can then select from the applicants identified by the HR department.

One of the difficult issues the organization may run into if it chooses an internal recruiting option is the presence of a bona fide seniority system, meaning a system that gives preference to individuals with longer tenure in the organization.49 If we have such a system, we may have to allow people with more seniority to apply for any internal job openings, which would limit our ability to use targeted or closed recruiting.

SHRM

I:5

Internal Recruitment: Promotability Ratings, Managerial Sponsorship, Self/Peer Assessments, Panels/Review Boards

Promotability Ratings and Managerial Sponsorship

We can do some things within the organization to make the internal recruiting process go a bit smoother in most cases. As part of our annual appraisal process, we can include a “promotability rating” for each member of the organization.50 This rating evaluates the individual for fitness for higher-level jobs in the organization. If we do it as part of our normal appraisal process, it adds very little to the workload of the managers in the company.

We may use some other tools to assess promotability in our efforts to find the best qualified individuals within the organization. We can have each of our employees complete a self-assessment, and we can also ask peers to assess their coworkers for promotability. We can also have people who desire to be considered for promotion put themselves before an organizational review board that will judge their qualifications and readiness for such promotion opportunities. Each of these options strengthens the ability of the organization to get the best possible candidates for internal promotion opportunities.

We can also request managerial sponsorship for a person to be considered for job opportunities through internal recruiting. In this case, we would ask managers to provide their sponsorship for an individual before that person would be considered for a promotion through the internal recruiting process. This sponsorship information would then be used in our internal recruiting efforts. This is a type of mentoring.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Internal Recruiting

Is it generally a good idea to recruit from inside the organization? What are the major advantages and disadvantages of internal recruiting?

5-1 Applying the Concept 5-1

Internal Recruiting

Review the following list of recruitment methods, and then write the letter corresponding to each recruitment method before the situation(s) in which it was used.

1. open

2. targeted

3. closed

· ____ 1. My supervisor got promoted to middle management and selected me to be his replacement.

· ____ 2. My company has a policy of posting all job openings, and we can apply for better jobs that we want.

· ____ 3. I got the job as supervisor in the other department because the VP of production recommended me for the position.

· ____ 4. My company stopped placing want ads in the newspaper, and it posts openings only online.

· ____ 5. I got the entry-level job because the HR representative sent me for an interview with the hiring manager.

Advantages include the following:

· Possible increases in organizational commitment and job satisfaction based on the opportunity to advance in the organization with commensurate increases in pay.

· The internal recruit will be able to learn more about the “big picture” in the company and become more valuable.

· The individual also has shown at least some interest in the organization, has knowledge of our operations and processes, and feels comfortable continuing employment within the company.

· The company has existing knowledge of the applicant and a record of that person’s previous work.

· The organization can save money by recruiting internally, because of both lower advertisement costs and lower training costs.

· Internal recruiting is usually faster than external recruiting.

And here are some of the disadvantages:

· The pool of applicants is significantly smaller in internal recruiting.

· There will still be a job to fill—the employee will move from somewhere else in the organization into the new job, so that employee’s old job will need to be filled as well.

· Success in one job doesn’t necessarily mean success in a significantly different job, especially if the employee is promoted to supervise former coworkers.

· An external candidate may have better qualifications for the job opening.

· Current employees may feel that they are entitled to the job whether they are capable and qualified or not, especially if we have a strong policy of preferring internal candidates.

· And the biggest threat to the company: We may create or perpetuate a strong resistance to change or stifle creativity and innovation because everyone in the organization, even the “new hires,” are part of the old organizational culture.

HRM in Action

Recruitment

External Recruiting

Employees who are changing jobs influence organizational performance, and companies commonly recruit people from other firms to satisfy their HR needs.51 External recruiting is the process of engaging individuals from the labor market outside the firm to apply for a job. External recruiting can also be accomplished in either an open or targeted manner, in much the same way as internal recruiting can. If we have an open recruiting effort, we will provide the job information for anyone who wishes to apply. If, however, we are using targeted recruiting (for example, through a headhunter) we would seek out specific individuals with the necessary skills and invite them to apply for the job opening.

SHRM

I:3

External Recruitment: Recruiters, Open vs. Targeted Recruitment, Recruitment Sources, Applicant Reactions, Medium (Electronic, Advertisement), Fraud/Misrepresentation

External Recruiting Sources

When we decide to recruit from external sources, what options do we have? Where would you recruit? Again, the answer is, “It depends.” Recall that we are trying to get a reasonable pool of applicants. So which option will give you the best pool of applicants for the specific job? We have to look at the type of person that we are trying to find and then go to the source or sources that will most likely provide that type of person.

Here are our external recruiting options. They are also listed with a summary of strengths in Exhibit 5-1.

External recruiting The process of engaging individuals from the labor market outside the firm to apply for a job

Walk-ins

Without actually being recruited, good candidates may come to an organization “cold” and ask for a job. Those seeking management-level positions generally tend to send a résumé and cover letter asking for an interview. Walk-ins may be good recruits for a couple of reasons. First, they have already selected your organization as an employment target because they took the initiative to come in and ask for a job. Second, there are no advertising costs associated with walk-ins, and you don’t have to wait for résumés and applications to come in from an external advertisement. So the process can occur much more quickly than it would with other external recruiting methods.

Educational Institutions

Recruiting takes place at high schools, vocational/technical schools, and colleges/universities. Many schools offer career-planning and placement services to aid students and potential employers. Educational institutions are good places to recruit people who have little or no prior experience. We might decide to recruit from educational institutions for a new external hire if we need somebody with a good general skill set, a degree, and some basic education. Such recruits will probably have a lot of specialized education in a specific field, which is always good. If you are looking for that type of person, a college/university might be a good place to go. If you are currently in school, have you visited your career services department? You don’t have to wait for senior year, when you are about to graduate, to take advantage of what they have to offer.

Employment Agencies

There are three major types of employment agencies:

Temporary agencies, like Kelly Services and Accountemps, provide part- or full-time help for limited periods. They are useful for replacing employees who will be out for a short period of time or for supplementing the regular workforce during busy periods. However, today, organizations are reluctant to add to their permanent workforce and instead create short- and long-term temporary positions (sometimes called permatemps) or contractual agreements with outside workers (i.e., independent contractors). Nearly 20% of individuals working in the United States are now working under such arrangements, and some HR experts expect that number to continue to increase.52

However, you should be cautioned here concerning the long-term use of temporary workers. There have been a number of lawsuits against employers in the past 10–15 years dealing with the hiring of “temporary” workers, when in fact those workers were permanent—just without the benefits associated with the company’s full-time permanent workforce. As we briefly noted in Chapter 4, probably the most famous and one of the most expensive settlements came in the case of Microsoft using permatemp workers in the 1990s. A class action lawsuit was filed and was being heard in the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals when Microsoft agreed to settle with the permatemp workers for nearly $100 million.53 In addition, groups of temporary workers have recently begun to unionize to fight for better working conditions and benefits.54

Public agencies are state employment services. They generally provide job candidates to employers at no cost or very low cost. One of the best and most often overlooked sources for external recruits, public employment agencies provide potential employees at all levels of the exempt and nonexempt workforce due to the fact that anyone who seeks unemployment assistance must be on the public employment agency rolls for possible employment. Too often, the public agencies get reputations as havens for the hard-core unemployed—those who do not want to work. However, they can be a strong source of good-quality employees, especially in bad economic conditions when many good workers lose their jobs. And the cost can’t be beat.

Private employment agencies are privately owned and charge a fee for their services. These agencies generally do a lot of prescreening for companies searching for employees, which can mitigate some of the agency fees. These agencies are generally good for recruiting people with prior experience. There are several different types of private employment agencies:

· General employment agencies operate on a for-profit basis. Some of them charge job seekers for their services, and others charge the employer. These agencies usually do not specialize in a particular type of employee, but some may operate only in certain employment categories such as IT, nursing and medical staffing, or accounting employment.

· Contingency agencies offer employees to the employer and are paid when the job candidate is hired by the employer. Contingency agencies frequently work with a more skilled set of clients—those with high-level manufacturing skills or mid-level management skills, for example, would be common candidates for contingency agencies.

· Retained search firms or executive recruiters are paid to search for a specific type of recruit for the organization and will be paid regardless of success in their recruiting efforts. Often referred to as “headhunters,” they specialize in recruiting senior managers and/or those with specific high-level technical skills, like engineers and computer experts. They tend to charge the employer a large fee and will be at least partially paid whether or not there is a successful hire. Usually, the retained search firm will be paid in three installments, with the first installment being nonrefundable. The installments might be split as percentages—40/30/30—with the first installment due on signing the contract, the second due around 90 days afterward, and the third due on successful completion of the hiring process. According to LinkedIn, “The majority of recruitingfees run between 15% and 25% of the candidate’s total first year annual earnings. A retained search assignment can be charged up to 50% in extreme cases when it’s a senior position and the role is hard to fill.”55 So if your organization is looking for a high-level manager at a salary level of about $100,000, it might cost almost that much to find a candidate using a headhunter. Therefore, retained search firms won’t generally be used for anything but high-level employee searches.

Many companies now recruit candidates online.

©iStockphoto.com/Rawpixel

Advertising

It is important to use the appropriate source to reach qualified candidates. A simple “Help Wanted” sign in the window is an advertisement. Newspapers are places to advertise positions, but advertising in professional and trade magazines may be more suitable for specific professional recruiting. There are also hundreds of online job search websites, such as Monster.com, Indeed.com, and Google for Jobs, which is partnering with companies such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Careerbuilder, and Glassdoor.

No matter which advertising option we use, however, we have to be aware of the potential for fraud and/or misrepresentation in our advertisements. As we noted earlier, if we knowingly (or in some cases, even unknowingly) provide misleading information, we can make the organization vulnerable to a lawsuit over fraud or misrepresentation. This is obviously something that we don’t want to do, so we need to check our ads for factual errors and exaggeration before we put them out to the public. Once we have checked our ads to ensure accuracy, our options for advertising include the following:

Local mass media. Is the Daily Planet (Thanks, Superman!), Channel 5, or the oldies FM radio station a good option for your recruiting dollars? As usual, it depends on what kind of candidate(s) you are looking for. Is advertising on local mass media a good option if you are looking for a lawyer or a nuclear physicist? Would it be the best place to spend your money? Maybe not. The cost per person reached by this form of advertising is very low, but you might not reach the people you are looking for.

What type of people would you look for through local mass media? Semiskilled or skilled line employees might be a good target for this type of advertisement, especially if you need a large number of them for a specific type of job. For example, when Southwest Airlines opened up a call center in Arkansas in the 1990s, it placed local newspaper, radio, and television ads for customer service representatives. Southwest wanted to find a large number of people (initially about 400 employees) with a basic skill set: the ability to interact with customers and solve their travel problems. The ads resulted in several thousand people applying for the customer service jobs that Southwest was trying to fill—a good 15-to-1 candidate pool, as we noted earlier.

Specialized publications. Publications that target specific groups of people—such as the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, or APICS Magazine—may be good sources of new recruits. There are many other examples of this type of specialty publication. Almost all of these publications have help-wanted advertisements similar to the local newspaper, but the ads tend to be targeted to a specific group of potential recruits. APICS Magazinewould be a good source if your company was looking for a supply chain or operations manager. The Wall Street Journal might be best if you were looking for someone for a senior level executive position, and the Financial Times could be a good source of financial managers and executives. However, if you are looking for a lower-level employee, these would probably not be the place to go. Ads in such specialty publications are more expensive and have less reach than do ads in the local mass media, but they are much more targeted toward the type of recruit that you may be looking for.

The Internet. What kind of people would you advertise for using the Internet? Should your company put every job opening up on the Internet? If you do, how many applicants are you going to get for each job opening? In many cases, companies are discovering that they may not want to advertise every job opening on the Internet because of its reach.56 They just don’t have the time to wade through thousands of applications for a single opening.

It seems that everybody is on the Internet today, but that isn’t true, even in the United States. Around 88.5% of Americans are on the Internet,57 but that still leaves 1 out of every 8 people whom you wouldn’t reach via Internet recruitment. And in other countries, the percentage of people without access is significantly higher than in the United States, so international recruiting efforts via the Internet may not give you the results that you desire. In fact, overall Internet access worldwide is only about 40%.58 The Internet is a good advertising medium for certain types of jobs, but not for every job.

What kinds of job openings would you want to advertise using the Internet? Jobs requiring computer or other high-level technical skills would probably have good potential for Internet recruitment, because technical people would tend to use the Internet more than people in nontechnical fields. But would you advertise for a five-star chef on the Internet? Unlikely. What about a janitor? Probably not. How is a five-star chef generally going to find a job? Most likely, a talented chef will find work through the use of recommendations and talking to people that the chef knows in the restaurant business. Word-of-mouth works well in this type of industry.

For people you will recruit from the local workforce and who have general skills (such as construction workers), it is unlikely that you will find them through the Internet. You have to look at what type of recruit you are looking for and ask whether the Internet is a logical place to advertise.

You might also want to use the Internet to recruit new employees using professional associations such as the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM). SHRM puts employment advertisements on its website; go to http://www.shrm.org and take a look at SHRMs HR Jobs link. Professional associations give us the ability to reach highly specialized individuals with specific skill sets. See Exhibit 5-1 for a review of internal and external recruiting sources.

As you can now see, there are a number of options when recruiting externally. Regardless of method, however, external recruiting has gone mobile and agile to a great extent. As in so many other areas of HRM, technology is finally becoming a valuable time-saver for the recruiter, so you will need to keep in mind the information on AI and other recruiting technologies as you recruit externally for high-quality candidates.

Advantages and Disadvantages of External Recruiting

What are the advantages and disadvantages of external recruiting?

Advantages include the following:

· The first and biggest advantage is the mirror image of the biggest disadvantage in internal recruiting—we avoid creating or perpetuating resistance to change, allowing a foothold for innovative new ways of operating.

· We may be able to find individuals with complex skill sets who are not available internally.

· We can lower training costs for skilled positions by externally hiring someone with the requisite skills.

· External hires will frequently increase organizational diversity.

Work Application 5-5

Identify the recruiting source that was used to hire you for your current job or a past job and explain how it was used.

What about disadvantages? There are certainly potential problems in bringing outsiders into the company:

· Disruption of the work team due to introducing significantly different ways of operating

· External recruiting takes much longer, which means it costs more

· Might adversely affect current employees’ motivation and satisfaction due to the perceived inability to move up in the organization

· Likely will incur higher orientation and training costs than internal recruiting

· The candidate may look great on paper, but we have no organizational history on the individual

LO 5-4

Identify and briefly discuss the major challenges and constraints involved in the recruiting process.

Challenges and Constraints in Recruiting

The process of recruiting is expensive and time-consuming. As a result, we want to pay attention to the effectiveness of our recruiting methods. Some methods can give us too many new recruits to review, costing us valuable time and money. Other options will not give us enough of a pool so that we have some flexibility in whom to choose, while still other options will cost too much for the results that we get. So the process of recruiting new employees has to be targeted a bit better than we may think.

5-2 Applying the Concept

Recruiting Sources

Using Exhibit 5-1: Major Recruiting Sources, write the letter (A–J) of which recruiting source is most appropriate in each of the following recruiting situations:

· ____ 6. You need a CEO from outside the company.

· ____ 7. “We need more employees, Jean. Do you know anyone interested in working for us?”

· ____ 8. We need to hire a new history professor.

· ____ 9. We need another computer programmer.

· ____ 10. A worker got hurt on the job and will be out for a week.

· ____ 11. We need an experienced clerical worker, but we don’t have any money for ads.

· ____ 12. We need a person to perform routine cleaning services, and experience is not necessary.

· ____ 13. The VP of finance needs a new administrative assistant.

· ____ 14. We have a supervisor retiring in a month.

· ____ 15. We like to hire young people without experience in order to train them to sell using a unique approach.

All management functions are subject to constraints and challenges, and the recruiting function is no different. We have to live within certain rules and policies while still making it possible to bring in the right kinds of people in the right numbers. Let’s discuss some of the most significant issues that we face in the recruiting function.

Budgetary Constraints

Probably the most obvious constraint is money. We have to live within our budgets in all cases, and recruiting is no exception. There are times when we would like to fly half a dozen top-notch recruits in from around the world to interview for a position, but such costs add up very quickly. We would need to look very carefully at whether or not funds are available and whether such a recruitment effort is necessary due to the key nature of the job being filled. We might agree to incur the cost if the position being filled was important enough, but we would not do so for a less significant job. Our budgets should always be created with the type of job that is being filled in mind.

Policy Constraints and Organizational Image

There are many organizational policies that can affect our recruiting efforts. We have to be familiar with such policies in detail to take them into account as we go through the recruiting process. Below are some of the policies that may affect recruiting.

Work Application 5-6

Explain how a firm’s image played a role in your applying for and accepting a job you currently hold or have held.

Whether we have a promote-from-within policy or not affects how we recruit. Our policies on temporary-to-permanent employees would also affect how we recruit in most cases. Do we have policies concerning recruiting and hiring relatives of current employees? If so, this would affect our recruiting efforts. Such a policy might significantly limit our ability to get referrals from current employees. Do we have an affirmative action policy in the organization? If so, it will dictate many of our recruiting procedures. We may also have a policy on how and when we communicate with any recruits or job applicants. If so, we need to understand and follow it.

We are also affected in our recruiting efforts by our organizational image in the markets from which we source our recruits.59 You may know of a company in your local community that you would rather not work for because of its bad reputation. Conversely, you might also know of an employer that you would very much like to work for because of its stellar reputation. Organizational image can play a significant part in determining our ability to source the people we need from the communities around us. A few organizations have lists of the best places to work, including Fortune’s “100 Best Companies to Work For.” Companies listed include Quicken Loans, KPMG, Google, SAS, and Genentech.60 This is just one of many reasons why we want to maintain a strong reputation in the communities that we serve.

The Recruiter–Candidate Interaction

Does the recruiter (or recruiters) affect the job candidates and their willingness to apply for a job in our organization? The obvious answer is yes. The recruiter is, in fact, one of the primary factors responsible for an applicant showing interest in our organization and our jobs.61 What kind of recruiter do we need in a particular hiring situation? How does the recruiter affect the job seeker, and how can we make sure that the effect is both positive and realistic?

Job candidates need a realistic job preview to understand what the job is all about.

©iStockphoto.com/Steve Debenport

The recruiter is the critical piece in the recruiting process. According to one report, “Recruiters with higher degrees of engagement and job fit dramatically outperform their peers who score lower in those areas. That’s measured both in the quality of hires and in productivity.”62 If you think about it, how well do you do things if they don’t matter to you? So if our recruiters aren’t engaged, how can we expect them to perform at a high level for the organization?

In addition to their desire to perform, though, we have to ensure that our recruiters have certain skill sets. The most important of these skills is probably active listening, which is the intention and ability to listen to others, use the content and context of the communication, and respond appropriately. This means that recruiters have to want to listen and must have developed their active listening skills so that they not only hear the words that recruits are saying but also understand the context of the conversations (what the circumstances are and why the other is communicating this information) so that they can empathize with recruits and visualize why they are providing this information.63 If recruiters can do this, they can respond accordingly and usually successfully. If they can’t do this, they will generally not provide the appropriate response to the recruit, and as a result, they may lose a valuable opportunity to bring someone with a strong skill set into the organization. Empathy in this situation (putting yourself in another’s position) allows the recruiter to visualize why something is being communicated and is critical if the recruiter is to respond correctly.

Besides active listening skills, recruiters have to have a strong set of communication skills. The recruiter must be able to talk with the recruits “on their level” in order to make them feel comfortable with the process. Recruiters need to learn when to ask probing questions and when to lie back and let a recruit talk. Role-playing training for the recruiter is particularly effective in teaching this skill.64

Work Application 5-7

Briefly describe the interaction you had with the recruiter for your current job or a past job. How could the interaction have been improved?

Active listening The intention and ability to listen to others, use the content and context of the communication, and respond appropriately

The recruiter’s job also includes successfully communicating with the hiring managers in the organization. The same active listening skills that serve recruiters with an applicant can allow them to more clearly define what the hiring manager wants and needs in the new organizational recruit. So we need to create strong training programs in communication with recruiters in the organization.65

We also have to train recruiters in the process of the Realistic Job Preview (RJP) discussed below. They need to understand the job in detail so that they can give honest answers and an RJP of the job to the potential candidate. In many cases today, with our complex jobs, we may have a recruitingteam with one person on the team having the “technical” knowledge of the job (maybe the supervisor of the job) and the other person having the HR-related knowledge that keeps us from inadvertently violating any laws, regulations, or internal policies. This helps us with the RJP because the technical person can explain details that the HR recruiter would generally not know or understand.

5-1 Self-Assessment

Career Development

Indicate how accurately each statement describes you by placing a number from 1 to 7 on the line before the statement. 7 = strong agreement; 1 = strong disagreement.

Describes me      Does not describe me

7  6  5  4  3  21

· ____ 1. I know my strengths, and I can list several of them.

· ____ 2. I can list several skills that I have to offer an employer.

· ____ 3. I have career objectives.

· ____ 4. I know the type of full-time job that I want next.

· ____ 5. I have analyzed help-wanted ads or job descriptions, and I have determined the most important skills I will need to get the type of full-time job I want.

· ____ 6. I have or plan to get a part-time job, summer job, internship, or full-time job related to my career objectives.

· ____ 7. I know the proper terms to use on my résumé to help me get the next job I want.

· ____ 8. I understand how my strengths and skills are transferable, or how they can be used on jobs I apply for, and I can give examples on a résumé and in an interview.

· ____ 9. I can give examples (on a résumé and in an interview) of suggestions or direct contributions I made that increased performance for my employer.

· ____ 10. My résumé focuses on the skills I have developed and on how they relate to the job I am applying for, rather than on job titles.

· ____ 11. My résumé gives details of how my college education and the skills developed in college relate to the job I am applying for.

· ____ 12. I have a résumé that is customized to each part-time job, summer job, or internship I apply for, rather than one generic résumé.

Add up the numbers you assigned to the statements and place the total on the continuum below:

84  74  64  54  44  34  2412

Career ready      In need of career development

So our selection and training of the recruiter is a major factor in our overall recruiting success. We have to find individuals who have the ability to actively listen and empathize with job candidates, and then we have to train those individuals in the communication skills that they will need and the roles that they will play with both the hiring manager and the candidates.

Job Characteristics and the Realistic Job Preview (RJP)

Let’s face it. Not every job we need to fill is glamorous. Perhaps you have seen the old show Dirty Jobs with Mike Rowe, or the currently running Undercover Boss. Mike and the executives take on some jobs that many of us do not want to do, at least not on a routine basis. Almost all organizations have such jobs, whether they be facilities jobs such as housekeeping or nursing aide jobs where we might be emptying bedpans (or worse). Even though some of our jobs are not glamorous, we need to find and recruit people to do them. The more difficult, dangerous, or just downright nasty a job is, the more difficult it is to recruit people into it. Still, there are people out there who are willing to do each of them. We just need to do the work required to find them and get them to apply. As discussed in the last chapter, the key to success is matching the right person to the job.

Realistic job preview (RJP) A review of all of the tasks and requirements of the job, both good and bad

Speaking of jobs that most of us would not want to do, should we hide the bad side of a job from recruits? This is really not an ethical thing to do and is not a good idea if we are looking at success in filling the job for the long term. This is becoming even more important with the Gen Y and Gen Z candidates that many companies are trying to attract. Most companies have come to the conclusion that realistic job previews are now a necessary part of the recruiting process. A realistic job preview (RJP) is a review of all of the tasks and requirements of the job, both good and bad. A good job analysis (Chapter 4) with a clear job description should provide a good RJP. We have found that “It’s incumbent upon recruiters and hiring managers to paint a clear picture of what will be expected of the candidate in his or her new role and to make sure promises of resources, job structure and reporting relationships are fulfilled.”66

Why would we want to tell people the bad parts of the job? Well, what do you think it would do to their job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and productivity levels if we hid the bad part of the job from them? Satisfaction and organizational commitment would almost certainly go down, and this would happen literally right after taking the job. Is this what we want to do in a recruiting situation? How likely is it that a person would quit very early on if they felt like they were lied to in order to get them to accept the job? And if they do quit, we incur all of our recruiting costs again, almost immediately. And there is strong research evidence that early turnover in a job is directly related to failure to provide an RJP for that job.67 Besides, job transparency is “happening whether we like it or not. Anonymous messaging apps like Memo and Blind encourage employees to share information . . . and company-rating sites such as Glassdoor and Vault open corporate life to the world,” according to Fortune magazine.68