Business Management

Unit III Lecture Transcript

Slide 1

Unit III, Staffing, Recruiting and Selecting.

Slide 2

In order to gain a deeper understanding of the concepts presented in this course,

the unit lessons will be structured in question and answer format. Each slide will provide

at least one question based on concepts presented in this unit and an accompanying

audio response from a subject matter expert. Review each slide to further enhance your

practical knowledge about the field of human resource management.

Slide 3 (1:29)

Meet Marilyn Pike. Marilyn has over 20 years of experience in HR leadership

positions in both the public and private sector, large and small businesses, and union

and non-union environments. She currently holds both the SPHR and SHRM-SCP.

Question: This unit focuses on both recruiting and selection, how do these two

activities work together?

Answer: Recruiting is the first step in matching actual employees to a specific job.

Then once we have a pool of applicants, we start the selection process of choosing the

best qualified applicant from that pool of applicants which we have just recruited. So

obviously, recruiting the best pool of qualified candidates possible is critical to finding

the best employees. When we tally up the costs of recruiting, selecting, and training a

new employee, those costs can be more than 100% of the employee’s annual salary.

And that doesn’t factor in the cost of turnover, which we will discuss in later chapters,

but turnover is often the result of a breakdown in the recruiting and selection process.

So there’s a lot on the line for both the company and the candidates. Because

candidates also want to be able to find the right fit for themselves when they are looking

for a new position. Applicant Tracking Systems (that are called ATS), which many

companies use, can be effective in searching for “key words” to find the applicants who

have included the right words in their resume. Unfortunately, the ATS doesn’t help when

it comes to finding applicants who may eventually be the best fit for the company. But,

let’s face it, going through resumes hand by hand, one by one, still doesn’t help when

trying to choose the best fit. That’s where the selection process, the interview process

comes in.

Slide 4

Question: What are the forces that drive recruiting?

Answer: There are social and legal forces that drive the search for potential

recruits.

There is supply and demand, meaning the number of potential candidates for a

position verses the number of positions that are open. The more specific the knowledge,

skills, and abilities needed for a job can drive the number of potential candidates. For

example, there is high demand for RNs right now. Many Baby Boomer nurses are

retiring, and there are not enough nursing school graduates to fill that void. That’s why

you will see hiring bonuses and other incentives, beyond good wages, used to recruit

nurses. Conversely, if you are recruiting for a position where the company can’t take a

worker with a basic skill set and train them—that increases the pool of candidates. But

the flip side of that larger pool of candidates is finding the “best” candidates from that

large pool of candidates. Social media can be a useful tool to reach potential candidates,

however, when recruiting a company has to be careful not to place targeted ads, which

have the potential to discriminate. For example, in March 2019, Facebook settled a

lawsuit and agreed to stop allowing companies to use detailed demographic information,

including gender, age, zip codes (which are often an indicator of race) from companies

placing recruiting ads (Jan & Dwoskin,2019).

Slide 5

Question: What are the advantages and disadvantages of internal vs. external

recruiting?

Answer: Well, of course, internal recruiting works well because you are dealing

with a known entity—someone who has been an employee for a certain period of time,

often at least six months. So you have been able to observe the employee’s work ethic,

how they get along with others, in any number of different variables, so you have a

sense of what type of worker they are. As a side note, I would advise everyone to

realize that every day they are at work, they are applying for their next job at that

company. Even though they may not realize it, people are paying attention to what they

are doing. Just recently I saw a good employee get passed over for a promotion because

too many people had witnessed her “blowing up” when things got stressful. Of course,

my thought was that her supervisor would have done her a great service to have

addressed that issue with her when he first identified it. We can go in to more about that

later in the class when we talk about performance improvement plans, but he didn’t, and

it cost her a promotion. Of course, when you promote from within, you create a domino

effect in the sense that you will have to fill the old job of the chosen internal employee.

And, there is the disclaimer that success in one job doesn’t necessarily mean success in

a different job. But, overall, I think hiring from within can make a lot sense in terms of

motivating employees.

All that said, external recruiting definitely has its advantages. A big one is bringing

in new ideas, we want to avoid perpetuating resistance to change and encourage

innovation and creativity. When we are unable to find internal individuals who have the

skill sets needed, there will be lower training costs and we have the potential to increase

diversity. But bringing someone new in can cause a potential disruption of the work

team, but I would counter that idea with the fact that any change to the work team is

generally going to cause some level of disruption. One big downside from my

perspective is that external recruiting takes longer than internal recruiting and costs

more. Also, the fact that it may adversely affect current employees’ motivation and

satisfaction, higher orientation and training costs, and, of course, the reality that the

candidate may look great on paper but may not perform after being hired.

Slide 6

Question: How do you look for “fit” and avoid discrimination?

Answer: Ahh….that, as they say, is a very good question. Because yes, of course,

we all have a tendency to have a “fit” with those who are “like” us. But, we are not

looking for people just like us, people who we would maybe want as friends. That is not

what being “fit” means. This type of hiring can lead to discrimination. That said, I think

as any company becomes more diverse and inclusive, we are all going to begin to feel a

“fit” with a variety of different people. So, to start, we need to be acutely aware of our

biases. I like a team approach to hiring because the team can double check each other

on any unconscious bias each may have. There are three types of fit:

Personality to job fit. Personality affects how people work. For example, I do not

like mice. I would not be a good candidate for the role of exterminator. But, also

something like whether an individual is an extrovert or an introvert. Classic example

would be you want someone who is more extroverted in the role of a sales person.

Ability to job fit. That’s where an individual’s physical and intellectual skills affect

how they work. For example, when I worked on a team to select recruits for a police

academy class, as you can imagine, there were specific physical and intellectual abilities

we were looking for, which we believed would make those candidates a good ability fit

for the position of police officer. Some of those abilities where physical. They had to be

able to run a distance in a certain time, and they had to be able to lift a certain weight.

In terms of intellect, they were give a test that measured their ability and predicted

whether or not they would be successful in the book portion of the class. Bottom line, it

is not good for the organization or the candidate to set someone up to fail.

Person to job fit. This is how individuals fit within the structure and how culture

affects how they work. Again, using the police recruit class selection, this was one area

we did not do well and learned from the experience. A police officer has to follow the

rules; there are specific protocols (ways) situations must be handled, while certainly

judgment plays a factor, there are procedures that must be followed. Some people do

not like those types of constraints on their ability to do their job. They believe they know

a better way, a more effective way, and that is the way they want to do it, regardless.

We lost 10% of our recruits because of this one error in selection.

Another more day-to-day example would probably be someone who works well in

a highly structured corporate position versus someone who works better in a more laid

back tech company. There are also the Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection

Procedures (what they call the UGESP), which provides information that can be used to

avoid discriminatory hiring practices as well as discrimination in other employment

decisions. It identifies what the federal government considers to be an employment test

and how these tests can be used in making employment decisions. The UGESP also

identifies the acceptable types of validity that can be used to validate employment

tests—content validity, criterion-related validity, and construct validity—and it notes that

these tests must be reliable. Note going back to the testing we did for the police

academy recruits, all those tests were statistically validated and reliable.

Slide 7

This concludes the Unit III question and answer session with subject matter expert

Marilyn Pike. Reflect on this question and answer session as you review your readings

for this unit.

Slide 8

Reference

Jan, T., & Dwoskin, E. (2019). Facebook agrees to overhaul targeted advertising

system for a job, housing and loan ads after discrimination complaints. The Washington

Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/facebook-

agrees-to-dismantle-targeted-advertising-system-for-job-housing-and-loan-ads-after-

discrimination-complaints/2019/03/19/7dc9b5fa-4983-11e9-b79a-

961983b7e0cd_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.074571667e1a