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Sources of Recruitment


According to Korsten (2003), Human Resource Management theories described on techniques of recruitment and selection and the benefits of interviews, assessment and psychometric examinations as employee selection process. They further stated that recruitment process is considered of two types which are internal and external recruitments. Typically, the two types are based on the levels of recruitment policies, job postings and details, advertising, job application and interviewing process, assessment, decision making, formal selection and training (Korsten 2003).

1.    Internal Recruitment

Internal recruitment has been observed to improve inbound employee satisfaction, boost the morale of existing employees and is a relatively cost-efficient process (Armstrong 2000). This involves spending time recruiting by promoting current employments within the organization prior to looking outside for talent. Internal referrals reduce the possibility of disappointment for incumbent employees, who themselves have been working hard to get promoted, to see someone they’ve referred seize a much deserved or desired opportunity (Billsberry, 2007). Another form of internal recruitment would be promoting employees within the organization. In this method, there is no need to carry out new induction programs, new-team member training and significantly reduces the transition period (Yilmaz and Kitapci, 2017).

Methods of Internal Sources

  • Transfers - Transfer involves moving out persons from current jobs to other similar jobs. These do not involve any change in designation, responsibility or prestige. The numbers of persons do not increase with transfers (Stewman, 1986).
  • Promotions - Promotions refer to moving out persons to positions carrying better prestige, higher responsibilities and more pay. The vacant higher positions may be filled up from within the organization. A promotion does not increase the number of persons in the organization (Cappelli, 2008). A person going to get a higher position will free his current position. Promotion will motivate employees to improve their performance so that they can also get promotion (Pergamit and Veum 1999)
  • Present Employees:The present staff of a priority area unit enlightened regarding doubtless vacant positions. The employees recommend their relations or persons intimately known to them. Management is relieved of looking out prospective candidates (Robbins and Coulter, 2005). The persons suggested by the workers is also usually appropriate for the roles as a result of they understand the wants of assorted positions. The existing employees take full responsibility of those recommended by them and also ensure of their proper behavior and performance (Tipper, 2004).

2.    External Recruitment

The other method of bringing new employees is through external recruitment. To bring new skills and passionate resources into the organization is the main advantage of this method of recruitment (Cappelli, 1999). This method also provides significant convenience to HR teams to target specific groups. However, it must be noted that external recruitment involves lot of time and money to find the ideal candidate. External recruitment methods include advertisement, employment exchange, employment agencies, education institute, private contractors, and recommendations (Delery & Doty, 1996).


Methods of External Sources

  • Press advertisement - A wide selection for choosing the suitable candidate for the post is avail­able through this source. It gives promotional publicity to the available posts and the details about the job in the form of job description and job specification are made available to public in general (Singh and Finn, 2003).
  • Campus interviews - It is the best possible method for organizations to select students/ freshers from various educational institutions. This method is easy and economical. The organizations personally visit various institutes and select students eligible for a particular post through various interviews. Students get a good opportunity to prove themselves and get selected for a good job (Gokuladas, 2010).
  • Placement agencies - A databank of candidates is sent to organizations for their selection purpose and agencies get commission in return (Collins and Steven, 2002).
  • Walk in interviews - According to Eriksson and Kovalainen (2016), interviews are declared by companies on the specific day and time and conducted for selection. Interviews can be classified into three types: structured, semi-structured and unstructured interviews.
  • Employment exchange - People are registered with government employment exchanges with their personal details by themselves. As per the needs and request of the organization, the candidates are sent for interviews (Robbins and Coulter, 2005).
  • E-recruitment - Various sites such as jobs.com, naukri.com, and monster.com are the available electronic sites on which candidates upload their resume and seek the jobs (Shahila, 2013)


For an example, the company I work for is a software company which does the internal sourcing as the primary source in terms of recruiting. As a result of that, resources are moved to higher positions quickly via promotions. Since the company is now more focus on the growth and profits, it’s required to have external sourcing since there are less resources to fill vacant positions. As per the above methods, press advertisement, campus interviews and e-recruitment can be used in order to recruit new resources to the organization. Based on that, organization can select best and skilled resources in order to achieve company goals.

Conclusion

Recruitment and selection process is the major importance of any organization to achieve organization short and long-term goals. Based on the sources (internal and external), any organizations could plan to recruit new resources by following any recruitment methods. To achieve success, every company must hire the right employees. With the right employers fitted in their respective positions, the company can move faster and achieve its targeted goals. Therefore, recruitment and selection are critical processes that companies can use to select the right candidates.

References

  • Armstrong M. (2005), A Handbook of Human Resources Management Practices, 9th edition, London: Kogan Page
  • Billsberry, J. (2007). Experiencing recruitment and selection. Chichester, John Wiley.
  • Cappelli, P. 2008 Talent on Demand: Managing Talent in an Age of Uncertainty. Boston: Harvard Business Press.
  • Collins, C.J. and Stevens, C.K., 2002. The relationship between early recruitment-related activities and the application decisions of new labor-market entrants: a brand equity approach to recruitment. Journal of applied psychology, 87(6), p.1121.
  • Delery, J. and Doty, D. (1996). Modes of Theorizing in Strategic Human Resource Management: Tests of Universalistic, Contingency, and Configurational Performance Predictions. Academy of Management Journal, 39(4), pp.802-835.
  • Eriksson, P and Kovalainen A (2016) Qualitative Methods in Business Research: second edition. SAGE Publications Ltd.
  • Gokuladas (2010),"Factors that influence first-career choice of undergraduate engineers in software services companies: A south Indian experience", Career Development International, Vol. 15 No. 2 pp. 144 – 165
  • Korsten A.D. (2003.) Developing a training plan to ensure employees keep up with the dynamics of facility management Journal of Facilities Management.
  • Pergamit, M. R., and Veum, J. R.1999 "What is a promotion?" Industrial and Labor Relations Review, 52: 581-601.
  • Robbins S.P., Coulter M.K. (2005). Management (8th ed.). Upper Saddle River,NJ: Prentice Hall.
  • Shahila, D. (2013), “ E-recruitment challenges” International Journal of Social science & Interdisciplinary Research IJSSIR, Vol. 2 (5), MAY 2013, PP.118-12.
  • Singh P, Finn D (2003). The Effects of Information Technology on Recruitment. J. Labour Res. 24(3):395-408.
  • Stewman, S. 1986 "Demographic models of internal labor markets." Administrative Science Quarterly, 31: 212-247.
  • Tipper T (2004). How to increase diversity through your recruitment practices. Industrial Commercial Training 35(4):158-61.
  • Yilmaz, Y., and Kitapci, H. (2017). The Impact of Strategic Human Resource Management on Institutionalization Process. Business Management and Strategy, 8(2), pp.77-93, [online]. Available at <http://www.macrothink.org/journal/index.php/bms/article/view/11403/9689>. [Accessed on 26th September 2019].  






Comments

  1. As discussed by Rutledge (2008), As another method of Recruitment, We can use electronic resources as a method, typically the internet but also HR software, to guide or assist the hiring process to reduce the administrative and financial burden of recruitment and gain access to a wider pool of talent.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi Sahan, appreciated your feedback on this post. Yes, E-Recruitment is one of the key feature in recruitment process. I have covered the E-Recruitment on “New Trend on Recruiting and Selection” post.

      Delete
  2. Agreed, Recruitment and selection are two different types of activities. Recruitment refers to the mechanism by which people generate interest in the job. The selection is the final decision of a specific candidate for a particular position. For any organization, the people who are recruiting must have the abilities, talents, and insights you need. In the long run, organizations need employees who are capable of facing challenges and continuing to learn. Therefore, organizations like this have more opportunities to gain a competitive advantage. For long-term approaches, orientation and ability are more important than current command and knowledge(Elern, 2009).

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    Replies
    1. Hi Sahan, appreciated your feedback on this post. The general purpose of recruitment according to Gamage (2014), is to provide the organization with a pool of potentially qualified job candidates. The quality of human resource in an organization highly depends on the quality of applicants attracted because organization is going to select employees from those who were attracted. Selection involves the use of one or more methods to assess applicant’s suitability in order to make the correct selection decision and can be alternatively seen as a process of rejection as it rejects a number of applicants and select only a few applicants to fill the vacancy. Thus, selection function may be a negative function rather than a positive function (Gamage, 2014).

      Delete
  3. Agreed, Internal recruitment is all about filling the vacancies by recruiting employees form the organisation itself. In this way, employees do get a chance for promotions, greater responsibility and better salary (Muscalu, 2015).

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    Replies
    1. Hi Shakir,
      appreciated your feedback on this post. agree with you and recruiting internally is very good for the growth of the organization as it reduces costs as compared to recruiting externally, and induction is not needed as the employees already know about the company. This form of recruitment also serves as a motivational tool for employees to work hard to aspire for higher positions which develops loyalty and sense of responsibility among employees hence boosting their morale. It reduces employee turnover among others (Akrani, 2011).

      Delete
  4. Hi Thilana, I would like to mention that job postings can also be another source of internal recruitment. The company I work for, for example, is an world recognized airline and often send engineers to foreign line stations to be posted as line station engineers.
    As internal and external sources each have benefits and drawbacks, companies should first take into consideration the nature and level of the job, as well as the organization's own recruitment policies, before deciding on the best source of recruitment (DeVaro, 2016).

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi Jehan,
      Appreciated your feedback on this post. The weakness to the job positing is employee pessimism that occurs when jobs are posted as open, but in reality, the organization has already selected a strong internal candidate. Such practices generate antipathy and disbelief among employees, when they believe the job posting is just a formality with less real opportunity for advancement (Gusdorf, 2008).

      Delete
  5. Hi Thilana, I would like to add another method of internal recruitment. There are basically five internal recruitment sources. These include:-Promotion, Transfer, Job Posting and Job Bidding apart from job bidding all other methods are common.The organization may also want some of its current staff to compete for certain jobs with other candidates, and the organization may arrange job bidding. Armstrong (2006). Job bidding is relativly new internal recruitment method to find out best fit for the perticuler job.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi Indika,
      Appreciated your feedback on this post. The weakness to the job positing is employee pessimism that occurs when jobs are posted as open, but in reality, the organization has already selected a strong internal candidate. Such practices generate antipathy and disbelief among employees, when they believe the job posting is just a formality with less real opportunity for advancement (Gusdorf, 2008).

      Delete
  6. Well written article as you mentioned there are two sources of recruitment named internal and external recruitment. I would like to add where recruitment can do internally by upgrading the employee position where employee motivates to work. The upgrade can be done with a small salary increment (Flecke,n.d).

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi Nayani,
      Appreciated your feedback on this post. agree with you and the organization I work for is also doing the same practice.

      Delete
  7. While agreeing on all your above details, I would like to add another external source for recruitment, which is video resumes. Technological advances in personal computers have opened the door to selection procedures using multimedia (Oostrom, 2010). Video resumes have been described as short, videotaped messages in which applicants introduce themselves to potential employers on the information, qualifications, skills and other features requested, such as motivation and career goals (Hiemstra, Derous, et al., 2012). Video resumes are typically uploaded to the Internet for review by potential employers (Doyle, 2010).

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi Anjula,
      Appreciated your feedback on this post and Video resumes are very time consuming for the employers to analyze and make decisions about the applicant. On the paper there is easy to find the required detail. In a survey of 401 human resource managers, Stewart and Anderson (1998) concluded that businesses prefer to hire through “on-campus interviewing and career days/fairs.” However, the reason for this preference was reported to be the ease of meeting multiple qualified candidates “face to face.”

      Delete
  8. Hi Thilan, Today E-recruitment has become a major topic in businesses. According to recent researches, social media networks have already been adopted by 92% of the companies in the United States of America. 93% of those are found in LinkedIn, 66% found in Facebook and 54% found in Twitter. These organizations are actively searching for young talent and there has been an 85% increase in recruiting activities via social media since 2007 (Salmen, 2012).

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi Sithari,
      appreciated your feedback on this post. agree with you and e-recruitment is coved under “New Trend on Recruiting and Selection” post.

      Delete
  9. Vyas (2011) asserted that the current trend is that organizations are looking for methods of reducing the timeand effortin the recruitment and selection process. Many companies in the contemporary context practice E-recruitement as a result which is fruitful.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi Sheron,
      Appreciated your feedback on this post. agree with you and e-recruitment is covered under “New Trend on Recruiting and Selection” post.

      Delete
  10. Therefore, agree with you that internal recruiting has the advantage of knowing the employee better, no productivity issues. As a result, internally selected candidates will be rewarded with more benefits, such as increases and promotions, thus increasing strong incentives for workers.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi Mizni,
      Appreciated your feedback on this post. agree with you and the organization I work for is also doing the same practice.

      Delete
  11. Agree upon the content. The primary goal of recruitment is attracting and retaining the right employee for the right position. Further, it envisions the positive image of the organization to individuals who make contact with the organization (Weeratunga, 2003). Also, successful recruitment should have a large pool of applications either through internal or external sources (Absar, 2012).

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi Namal,
      There present competition among business enterprises for recruiting the most possible workers in on the pathway towards creating innovations, with management decision making and employers trying to hire only the best applicants who would be the best fit for the company culture and ethics specific to the company (Price 2007).

      Delete
  12. Hi Thilana, Yes, the Human Resource Management theories describes the techniques of recruitment and selection. Also the recruitment process is considered of two types which are internal recruitment and external recruitment (Korsten, 2003).

    ReplyDelete

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