CHAPTER FOUR I EMPLOYEE RECRUITMENT, SELECTION, PLACEMENT

Organizations:

- Spend a lot of time, money and energy to recruit and select a qualified, productive workforce
- Compete with one another for the most skilled and productive employees
- Realizing the importance of developing comprehensive programs for employee recruitment, screening,
testing and selection
- Becoming more forward thinking
- Costs of hiring the wrong types of workers>investing in developing good recruitment and screening
programs

Human Resource Planning

- Organizations should continually evaluate their human resource needs and plan their hiring and
staffing in order to meet their companies’ business goals
- Begins with the strategic goals of the organizations
- Factors to consider:
o Organization’s goals and objectives
o Staffing needs required
o Current human resource capacities and existing employee skills
o Additional positions needed
- Issues to consider:
o Changing nature of work and workforce
o Increased competition for the best workers
o Assuring there is a good fit between workers and organization
o Increased workforce diversity
- Time frames:
o Training needs
o Competitively recruiting the highest potential employees
o Compensation and benefit programs
o Finding employees that are a good fit to the company and its culture
- Sample Model
o Talent Inventory-an assessment of current KSAOs of current employees and how they are used
o Workforce Forecast-a plan for future HR requirements
o Action Plans-development of a plan to guide the recruitment, selection, training and
ecompensation of future hires
o Control and Evaluation-having a system of feedback to assess how well the HR system is
working and how well the company met its HR plan

STEPS IN THE EMPLOYEE SELECTION PROCESS

- Employee Recruitment
o Process by which organizations attract potential workers to apply for jobs
o Starting point: understanding the job and what kinds of worker characteristics are required (use
products of job analysis)
o Objective: attract a large pool of qualified applicants
 Recruitment techniques:
 Job advertisements (internet sites, newspapers, magazines, radio, television)
 Employment agencies
 Referrals by current employees
 Employee referrals and applicant-initiated contacts  higher quality workers
and workers who were more likely to remain in the company than
advertisements and employment agencies
 Employees are unlikely to recommend people who are not good to save
themselves from embarrassment
 Those who directly apply have done research on the company and/or
position (more motivated)
 Internet had changed recruitment techniques
 Downside: large number of applicants to sift through
 Idea: interactive web site that would provide feedback(reduce mismatch)
o Two-way process
 Company is recruiting potential employees applicants are evaluating potential
employers
 Applicants
 prefer: large, multinational companies than small organizations
 influenced by: the type of industry, profitability of company, company’s
reputation, opportunities for development and advancement, and company’s
organizational culture
 influenced by company’s recruitment program and by recruiters
 recruiters who were viewed by applicants as more
personable/competent/informative led to more positive impressions
(recruiters play an important role in helping applicants decide if there is a
good fit between them and the company)
 “Overselling”
 May backfire when they mislead applicants
 Realistic Job Preview- an accurate description of the duties and responsibilities
of a particular job
 Form: Oral presentation, visit to the job site, brochure/manual, work
simulation
 Face to face > written ones (based on effectivity)
 Important to increase commitment and satisfaction and to decrease
initial turnover
 Due to applicants’ self-selection (make an informed decision)
 Lower unrealistically high expectations
 Give information to applicants
  Requires: recruiting more applicants(some will leave after presenting the
RJP)
 Issue: unrealistic expectations that applicants have about jobs and careers
 Goal: avoid intentional or unintentional discrimination
 Take steps to attract applicants from underrepresented groups in proportion to
their numbers in the population
 Also important to get them to accept the job offers
- Employee Screening
o Process of reviewing information about job applicants to select individuals for the job
- Employee Selection and Placement
o Actual process of choosing people for employment from a pool of applicants
o All information gained from screening procedures is combined to make actual selection
decisions
o Model:
 Criteria-measures of job success typically related to performance
 May be composed of many factors
 Ultimate criterion: success on the job
 Predictors- variables about applicants that are related to(predictive of) the criteria
o Making Decisions
 Goals: maximize the probability of accurate decisions in selecting job applicants; assure
that decisions are made free from intentional and unintentional discrimination against
applicants
 Decision Errors:
 False Positive-accept applicants who would have been unsuccessful
 False Negative-reject applicants who would have been successful
 More difficult to identify
 Clinical Approach
 A decision maker combines the sources of information in whatever fashion
seems appropriate to obtain a general impression about the applicant
 Error prone and inaccurate
 Statistical Models
 Combines information for the selection in an objective, predetermined fashion
 Each piece of information has some optimal weight that indicates its strength in
predicting future job performance
 Multiple Regression Model
 An employee selection method that combines separate predictors of job
success in a statistical procedure
 In an additive, linear fashion
 “Compensatory”- high scores on one predictor can compensate for low
scores on another
 Multiple Cutoff Model
  An employee selection method using a minimum cutoff score on each of
the various predictors of job performance
 Applicants must obtain a score above the cutoff on each predictor
 Advantage: ensures all eligible applicants have some minimal amount of
ability on all dimensions that are believed to be predictive of success
 Commonly used in public-sector organizations
 Set cut-off scores that distinguish the best candidates but that does not
discriminate against minorities
 Multiple Regression and Multiple Cutoff Models can be used but they are
typically only used when number of applicants are large
 Multiple Hurdle Model
 An employee selection strategy that required that an acceptance or
rejection decision be made at several stages in a screening process
 Advantage:
 unqualified persons do not have to go through the entire
evaluation program before they are rejected
 employers can be confident that applicants who are selected have
the potential to be successful
 Disadvantage: expensive and time consuming
- Employee Placement
o Process of assigning workers to appropriate jobs
o Occurs:
 Typically takes place when there are two or more openings that a newly hired could fill
 Also occurs when organizations close departments/offices and employers do not want
to lay off workers
o Similar to Employee Selection (although the employee has already been hired)
o Find the best possible fit of worker’s KSAOs and the requirements of the job openings
o International Assignments
 Cultural sensitivity and ability to adapt are important
 Attention must also be given to developing and training workers

Equal Employment Opportunity in Employee Selection and Placement

- Protected groups- groups including women and certain ethnic and racial minorities that have been
identified as previous targets of employment discrimination
- Adverse Impact- when members of a protected group are treated unfairly by an employer’s personnel
action
- Affirmative Action-the voluntary development of policies that try to ensure that jobs are made
available to qualified individuals regardless of sex, age or ethnic background