Organizational practice

To what extent is there a gap between the prescriptive model of recruitment and selection and organizational practice? In order to illustrate the gap between organizational practices and recruitment and selection, it is important to define and explain the two concepts. Recruitment is the process that occurs when the human resource department of an organization sets out to find the most suitable candidates for a vacancy that has arisen; the selection process is the appointment of the most suitable candidate from a range of applicants and applications.

When a company decides that there is a need for recruitment the human resource department must determine the position of the job and its role so as to determine the internal and external method of recruiting. The internal method includes promotions and sideways appointments while the external sources includes advertising, schools and universities, internal recruitment and so on just to name a few. The human resource management department has to initially determine if there is a need for a new employee; define an outline of the kind of person that is required.

After which it must design the most appropriate form of looking for the right candidate. The most widely used form of recruitment and selection is the interviewing system which is used when recruiting a large number. This system can be quite costly as it requires a lot of time and money. Thereby making it difficult to select the best recruit, and still be cost effective. From here it is possible to draw there first possible gap between organizational practice of cost minimization and recruitment and selection of the best applicant.

This arises because there is a great restraint on the time and money allowable for recruitment but yet the only the best selection will suffice cause major friction practices and performance. The human resource department has three steps when it comes to recruiting and selecting its new employees which are planning what the job entails; using both internal and external candidates and choosing the right candidate. In most organizations the recruitment and selection are based on the seventh-point plan and the fivefold grading system.

The seventh-point plan is what the human resource management department uses to decide on the criteria of people that they are looking for. They base their selection on the appearances, the educational qualifications, literacy, hobbies, dependence and independence, and family background. The fivefold of grading system bases recruitment on looks, the education qualification acquired, willingness and ability to learn new things, future ambitions and ease to adapt to a new job.

Various organizations today tend to use the competency based approach in their recruitment and selection process, Robert (1997) suggests that “the benefit of taking a competencies approach is that people can identify and isolate the key characteristics which would be used as the basics for selection, and that those characteristics will be described in terms which both can understand and agree…….

The competencies therefore become a fundamental part of the selection process”. The competency approach helps the interviewer to know the type of questions that would be asked during the interview in order to know if the person that is interviewed for that position fits the job that he/she is being interviewed for. The competency based approach helps the personnel team support the recruitment and selection purpose when they are about to make their choices.

The recruitment and selection process based on the competency based approach is meant to meet a particular standard that is meant for the new employee on the basis of if the new employee would be of value to the organization and can be used as a level of development for the organization in the long run. When the organization is deciding on the type of employee that they would need the personnel team would have to draw the right kind using the factors that would make them involved in the job.

They are meant to consider adding both the hygiene and motivational factors in place, for example payment and reward, future promotions, social mobility, job security and so on this makes the prospective employee understand really the type of job he/she is getting into. Another type selection method that may be used in that particular organization could be the application form, the interviewing, or the referencing based on what Cook (1993) referred to as the “classic trio”.

Going by some organizations they are likely to substitute the classic trio of selection with bidet, psychological tests or even the assessment centers. Organizational practices could be said to be the laid down convention or rules that govern a firm and the prescriptive manner of operation in an organization. The gap between the recruitment and selection and organizational practice could be said to stem from how organizations fail to recruit and select correctly because of the laid down laws that they have enacted into their organizational practices as illustrated from the conflict mentioned earlier.

The use of ancient recruitment and selection technique as a result of the lack of practices to change with the times; that is, firms not reviewing their rules and practices in accordance with innovations that is take place in the world today like new skills introduced into the system and more cost effective means of recruitment.

The organization believes that since the same system helped them in pulling the employees they have at present that they should continue to use the same system. In a case where the organization believes that using their own system still caters for the new breed of employees may not enable them to pick the right or the best possible candidate from the lot.

This causes a gap between organizational practices and recruitment and selection because the system does not recruit the right sort of employees and it affects the organization in the long run because of the loss in improvement that they might have been able to get where they able to pick the right sort of candidate into their organization. This gives their competitors a market edge over them when they introduce a new and better improvement into their own product.