The Purpose of Recruitment & Selection

Jeff Popova-Clark

The overall goal of recruitment and selection for a position is to cost-effectively attract, detect and select those people who are most likely to optimally contribute to the organization within that position at a particular point in time (and into the future). This definition clearly highlights the set of common errors made by organizations during their recruitment and selection efforts:

Spending an exorbitant amount of staff time and money recruiting and selecting for positions where the variations in future performance between any potential applicant is relatively small. This cannot be justified on a cost-benefit basis. (Cost-benefit)
Even if an applicant is a world class professional within a particular area of expertise it does not mean that same individual will be an excellent, good or even average performer in the particular role. (Job fit)
Utilizing the best techniques available is pointless if you do not attract any good applicants. (Recruitment marketing)
Having the best applicant pool available is pointless if your selection techniques do not reliably or validly predict future job performance. (Predictive power)
An applicant who is overqualified for a position may not repay the investment of the recruitment and selection exercise and initial training before leaving the job. (Job fit)
The best applicant pool and the best selection techniques are useless if the position is not understood by either the selection committee or the applicants.
A recruitment and selection process that takes too long may cause your organization to miss the opportunity window which generated the requirement for the position in the first place and/or cause you to lose the best applicants. (Timeliness)

Recruitment and selection is an opportunity to either reward a very high performing employee in order to unleash their potential in a new position or to bring in the fresh perspective and new skills of an external recruit.

Recruitment and Selection is Not:

the blind following of procedures as set out by departmental policy (The process requires a great deal of thought and planning and a high level of commitment to the goal of recruitment and selection.),
purely the detection of talented and/or experienced people (Instead, you need to maximize the job fit.),
a necessary evil (Recruitment and selection is an opportunity to expand the range of skills and potential in your organization.), or
something anyone can do well (Recruitment and selection is a very difficult task requiring extensive knowledge of the position, the organization, the labor market, recruitment strategies, and selection techniques.).

Stages of Recruitment and Selection:

There are four stages to all recruitment and selection:

Assess the job and determine its human requirements
Attract well targeted applicants
Assess the applicants objectively and validly
Select the applicant with the closet fit to the job's human requirements.

Never forget the first step, as it is crucial to the goal of maximizing job fit. Too often selection committee try to detect the most talented and/or the most experienced applicant without really knowing what talent and experience the applicants need for the job. Further, in the public service, our recruitment efforts normally extend only to advertising in the Government Gazette. Selection committees must ask themselves if such an advertisement reaches the most lucrative markets or whether further efforts are justified. We tend also to use purely subject evaluation techniques and then enumerate the results to give the impression of empiricism and objectivity to the process. We must begin to use a better, more objective range of techniques to improve our hit rate of successful selection decisions. Further we are obligated by law to utilize techniques in an effort to minimize discrimination.

Finally, we must learn to hire the best person for the job, not necessarily the most qualified applicant. High performing academics do not necessarily become high performing university administrators. It is job fit that is important, the best person for the job, not necessarily just the best person (as measured by some other dimension).

Recruitment and Selection -- A Strategic Function

Recruitment and selection is the most crucial internal activity of every service organization. Poor recruitment and selection makes every part of the organization less effective. Excellent recruitment and selection can transform an organization in a short period of time. An organization with 20% turnover per year and recruitment and selection practices that hire mediocre employees, can theoretically become fully mediocre within 5 years. (From the article, Why Employment is a Strategic Function - the Business Impacts of a Bad Hiring Decision , by Dr. John Sullivan, San Francisco State University.)

The concept of human capital management is that innovation and quality arise from your human resources and not from your machines, processes, or financial instruments. In order to maximize the performance of your human resources and, therefore, your organization, you must attract, select, develop, motivate and retain the best people possible. Recruitment and selection is the cornerstone of human capital management.

The Cost of Recruitment and Selection

There are three kinds of costs associated with recruitment and selection:

the costs of undertaking the exercise itself,
the cost of making a bad call, and
the cost of taking too long to come to a decision.

The Cost of the Exercise

Recruitment and selection is an expensive process. It can involve:

job analysis
creation of a job description
endorsement of the job description
endorsement of the evaluation
position creation
endorsement of the position creation
formation of a selection committee
development of the selection procedure
validation of the selection procedure
search for potential employees
search for potential transferees
creation of an advertisement
dissemination into one or more publications
distribution of the position description
acceptance of applications
photocopying of applications and distributing them to the selection committee
assessment of applications
short-listing
selection (normally just an interview)
checking references
offering the position
notifying unsuccessful applicants
providing feedback to unsuccessful applicants

If you are unlucky (and/or not careful) you may also find yourself answering an appeal over the recruitment and selection process. Appeals are a costly and time-consuming process that can also become quite emotive.

It should also be noted that positions with lower remuneration tend to attract a greater number of applicants. This tends to create the converse situation that lower level recruitment and selection costs more than for higher level positions. It may also be that the difference between applicants for the lower level positions will not vary dramatically (basically any of the applicants do to the job as well as any of the others). Obviously, under such circumstances, intensive investment in the recruitment and selection exercise is not justified. Recruitment and selection committees should consider more cost effective strategies.

Cost of a Poor Recruitment and Selection Decision

The costs of poor recruitment and selection decisions are basically the cost of having he less than optimal candidate in the position and the risk of undergoing an appeal. The following are a few of the many costs of a poor performing employee:

less excellent ideas and more mediocre ones
poorer role models for subordinate staff
higher requirement for training (higher cost & more down time)
more errors and fix up work
greater reliance on peers, who then spend less time on their own tasks
less satisfied customers, managers, staff, peers, and suppliers
lower quality product with greater wastage, higher cost, less deadline compliance
taking up a position that could be held by a high performer
giving the position a bad name (as well as the organization) through poor work quality, low output levels, tardiness, negligence, less learning on the job and poor advice
less competencies to pass onto workmates
less motivation and satisfaction of the employee
higher risk of having to undertake diminished performance intervention
higher risk of having to do the whole recruitment and selection exercise again
decreased effectiveness of training and performance management
decrement to overall service level to customers
increased risk of disaster

There is not 100% reliable and 100% valid selection techniques that can discriminate between a high performer and a low performer for any position, so there will always be the selection decision that turns out to be poor. The trick is to make your selection processes as objective, consistent and valid as possible to minimize the number of poor selection decisions. Given the potential costs of poor recruitment and selection and the potential benefits of excellent recruitment and selection, managers need to review the range of selection techniques before them and choose the most appropriate ones for the vacant position ad organizational circumstances.

The Cost of Taking Too Long Over Recruitment and Selection

There are a number of crucial costs resulting from tardy recruitment and selection. They include:

losing the opportunity window which justified the position in the first place
losing the opportunity to get the best applicants before your competition
having a non-producing position for an extended length of time
unavailability of the professional knowledge associated with the position
organizational structures settling around not having the position
increasing the workload and stress of surrounding staff
having a less than optimal replacement temporarily in the position
an increasingly complex mess to clear for the incoming hire's first weeks on the job
longer period of confusion for suppliers and customers regarding contact points
reduction in the availability of the recruitment pool
corporate embarrassment (recruitment and selection is contact with the outside world and a demonstration of our workplace efficiency)

Cost Summary

The ideal recruitment and selection exercise would perfectly assess the human requirements of a position, attract the very best applicants in the world, detect which of those is the very best for the position for now and in the future, set up no harmful expectation in the successful applicant, have a 100% success rate of job offers and all be done instantly and at no cost. Obviously this ideal is unachievable. You generally need to trade off the level of expenditure on recruiting and the time spent on selecting against the potential gains of firing a better employee. Sometimes these judgments are hard to make, but if you are award of the tradeoffs you can at least make better judgments than if you blindly follow procedure in every case.

Jeff Popova-Clark is with the Department of Training and Industrial Relations, Queensland, Australia. He may be reached by email at Jeffrey.Popova-Clark@dtir.qld.gov.au or by mail at GPO Box 69, Level 4, Citibank Centre, Human Resource Administration Unit, Corporate Services Division, Brisbane QLD 4001, Australia.