RECRUITING AND

SELECTING STAFF
CHAPTER 3
 INTRODUCTION

• Good recruitment is essential to effective HRM. The effectiveness of many other

human resource activities, such as selection and training, depends largely on the
quality of new employees attracted through the recruitment process.
• Recruitment and selection are often lumped together under the broader label of
resourcing, but they are very separate processes.
• Both recruitment and selection practices differ depending on the type and level of
employee required — but they also differ between countries. The breadth of
potential legislation that affects recruitment is considerable. Also, nearly all of the
recruitment and selection processes outlined in this chapter are dependent upon the
skill and competence of the line managers (or HR practitioners) who carry them out.
 HUMAN RESOURCE PLANNING
• Human Resource Planning is a process of accessing and
identifying future HR needs of an organization to fulfil the
strategic plan established by its top management
• In organization, planning for human resource is critical to ensure
the right number of qualified employees is placed in the right
job at the right time.
• HR planning has 3 main components :
• Forecasting HR requirements (demand)
• Assessing HR availability (supply)
• Comparing HR requirements and availability
 HR PLANNING PROCESS
Strategic planning

HR planning

Forecasting HR Forecasting HR
Comparing
requirement availability

Demand= Surplus of Shortage of

supply worker worker

Corrective Corrective
No action
measures measures
• Forecasting HR requirements (demand)
• determining the number and type of employees needed

• Assessing HR availability (supply)

• To access HR availability, manager look at the current internal workforce. Important
sources of data include the organization’s staffing tables and skills inventories

• Comparing HR requirements and availability

• The forecast for future HR requirements and data from the current internal workforce will
then be compared to determine the right HR strategy needed
 What is Recruitment and Selection?

o Recruitment is the process of attracting suitable for

job vacancies.

o Selection involves choosing the most suitable

candidate from among a group of applicants.
Potential Costs of a Bad Recruitment Decision

❑ Cost of mistakes, accidents and loss of customers caused by

employees who cannot cope with the job
❑ Cost of lowered morale among the employee’s supervisor and
his co-workers who have to rework his mistakes or take over his
tasks
❑ Cost of defending a claim of dismissal without just cause or
excuse, once the employee has been dismissed
❑ Cost of recruiting a replacement
❑ Cost of training a replacement
 THE PURPOSE OF RECRUITMENT

• To determine present and future staffing needs in conjunction with job analysis and human resource
planning
• To increase the pool of applicants at minimum cost
• To increase the success rate of the (subsequent) selection process: fewer will turn out to be over- or
under-qualified
• To increase the probability of subsequent retention
• To encourage self-selection by means of a realistic job preview
• To meet responsibilities, and legal and social obligations
• To increase organisational and individual effectiveness
• To evaluate the effectiveness of different labour pools.
 SELECTION

• Selection — a linked but separate practice after recruitment — then involves the
identification of the most suitable person from a pool of applicants.
• The purposes of selection:
• To obtain appropriate information about jobs, individuals and organisations in order to enable
high-quality decisions
• To transform information into a prediction about future behaviour
• To contribute to the bottom line through the most efficient and effective way to produce
service/production
• To ensure cost—benefit for the financial investment made in an employee
• To evaluate, hire and place job applicants in the best interests of organisation and individual.
 RECRUITMENT METHODS

• We begin with a brief summary of the principal recruitment and selection tools and
techniques. Figure A shows some Cranet data for 2010, and national differences in word of
mouth, company websites and reliance on educational instututions. It is clear that an
internal labour market is still very dominant in Japan and, perhaps surprisingly, is also
important in the USA and the UK, despite the comments above about their strong external
labour markets.
• The use of company websites is also much higher in the traditionally external labour
market countries of the USA and the UK, but are nowhere near as important in Japan.
• In 2004 fewer than 1% of UK organisations reported using this method, but by 2010 the
proportion had grown to 20%.
FIGURE A:
Recruitment
practices for
managers in six
countries
 THE RECRUITMENT PROCESS
• Human resource manager at this stage of the recruitment and selection
process is to attract a group of applicants.

Internal Applicants External Applicants

Offering existing employees the Employer can recruit workers from outside
opportunity to change jobs within the market.
organization helps retain the best and most
versatile workers.

12
• Recruitment occurs through both informal and formal methods. Informal methods rely on
the contacts of existing employees or on people just applying. Because they risk being
discriminatory, word-of-mouth recruitment is rarely acceptable in the public sector. In
contrast, in the business services sector, word-of-mouth recruitment is common,
particularly in those societies rated more collectivist by Hofstede and House et al
• International differences in the use of informal recruitment are substantial but it is
widespread throughout the world, especially in poorer countries. Many specialists would
defend it. Recruitment of 'family and friends' is very cheap, it aids a sense of community in
the workplace, and it provides at least the option of informal control ('If you behave like
that, you will embarrass your uncles who got you the job...').
• Formal methods are invariably more expensive than informal ones. We make specific
mention of methods of recruitment that take on more significance for international HR
managers:
• Headhunting
• Cross-national advertising
• The internet
 HEADHUNTING

• A headhunter is a company or individual that provides employment recruiting services on

behalf of the employer. Headhunters are hired by firms to find talent and to locate
individuals who meet specific job requirements. Headhunters may also be referred to as
executive recruiters and the function they perform is often called executive search.
• The Association of Executive Search Consultants' (AESC) 2009 Member Outlook Survey
showed that despite the economic recession, executive jobs in several sectors continued
to grow, namely in healthcare, government, natural resources and
pharmaceuticals/biotech. China had the greatest need for talent in 2009, based on the
global average vote (66%), and India was expected to see the second greatest demand
for top executives (43%), with eastern Europe set to be the third most talent-hungry
market in 2009.
 CROSS-NATIONAL ADVERTISING

• Organizations are looking to Europe and beyond to attract professionals to work in

the UK, or to work in locations around the globe. If the costs of getting a recruitment
campaign wrong are high in the domestic market, then the potential costs of errors in
global campaigns are very high.
• Advertising agencies gather a broad spectrum of international intelligence which
focuses on the location of the target audience, the kind of market they operate in,
sample salaries, recruitment competitors, and whether the job-seeking audience is
passive or active. Knowledge of the best recruitment media and national custom and
practice are important in order to ensure the cultural appropriateness of a campaign.
 INTERNET RECRUITMENT

• The Internet offers considerable potential as a source of recruitment for

internationally mobile managers, small firms seeking specialist skills, or larger firms
wishing to demonstrate their presence.
• The online recruitment market is proving most useful for international graduate
recruitment. A series of electronic recruiting products and services is reshaping the
job-finding process. E-recruitment (electronic recruitment) has the potential to
reduce the barriers to employment on a global scale. The technology — which might
include organization websites, job boards and online newspaper job pages or the
use of social networking sites — can be used to:
• deal with the applications - email enquiries, emailed application forms/CVs, online
completion of application forms
• select candidates — online testing, information-gathering
 THE ADVANTAGES OF USING THE
INTERNET
It allows firms to:
• Speed up the recruitment cycle and streamline administration
• Make use of IT systems to manage vacancies more effectively and co-ordinate recruitment processes
• Help handle high-volume job applications in a consistent way
• Widen recruitment sourcing and reduce recruitment costs
• Reach a wide pool of applicants by advertising vacancies — on your organisation's website, on job sites, or on social networking
sites
• Reach a niche pool of applicants and attract applicants on a more specialised skills match (by encouraging applicants to use
personal search agent facilities)
• Improve on traditional advertising approaches by targeting particular lifestyle or culture-fit groups (such as expatriates or people
who consume services similar to those provided by the host firm)
• Make internal vacancies widely known across multiple sites and separate divisions
• Offer access to vacancies 24 hours a day, seven days a week, thereby reaching a global audience
• Provide a cost-effective way to build a talent bank for future vacancies provide more tailored information to the post and
organization — for example case histories of the 'day in the life' or a self-assessment questionnaire or quiz to assess fit with the role.
 PROBLEMS WITH USING THE INTERNET

• Using the Internet for international recruitment has received a mixed reaction but is
slowly emerging as a useful process. Firms have faced a number of problems with web
recruitment
• The main impact can be to increase the volume of applicants, and in a time of tight
resources within HRM this is not always good news. There are then also problems with
using e-recruitment methods:
• Targeting particular populations becomes difficult. For example, in running webpages in
Singapore, applications are likely to be received from places such as Malaysia.
• Generating a larger number of applicants from more diverse social groups may lead to a need
for extensive screening activities.
• Quality becomes more variable and needs managing.
 SELECTION TOOLS AND TECHNIQUES

• Organizations can choose from a wide range of selection methods, including references, interviews and
tests. Many organizations use not just one but a combination of selection practices.
• Data gathered for the Cranet project from 2010 for six key countries continued to demonstrate several
differences. They are shown in Figure B, some key differences in practice can be observed:
• Interview panels are particularly popular in the UK, the USA and Germany, but are only infrequently used in
France and Japan.
• One-to-one interviews are by far the most frequent practice in those two countries.
• Psychometric testing is relatively widespread amongst UK and Swedish organizations, but in the USA, France and
Japan only between 10% and 20% of organizations use this method.
• Some selection methods are then common in some countries but may not be used at all in others. Reflecting a
long-standing finding, graphology — reading character through handwriting — features as a method only really
in France (even here it is only used in around 12% of organizations).
• By far the most common selection method is through interviews. But other methods have recently begun to attract
more attention, such as assessment centers and psychological testing.
FIGURE B:
Selection
practices for
managers in 6
countries
 INTERVIEWS
Planning the Interviews
1. The timing : how long each interview is to take and setting up a timetable accordingly
2. The venue: plan the interview room's layout and requirements to ensure the applicants able to give his best during the
interview
3. The topics for discussion: the interviewer must have a thorough understanding on the job description and specification, have
read the candidate’s application form

Conducting the Interviews

1. Avoid stress technique: if using the stress techniques ( interrogate the applicants like a police interrogation) may leaves a
negative impression on the applicants hence they may prefer to look for a job elsewhere
2. Establish rapport: using a friendly/ suitable non-verbal gesture
3. Ask the right questions: as the objectives is to gather as much information as possible about the interviewee

After Interview
• The recruitment officer will need to compare the applicants based on information collected and make his final choice of
candidates.
• The top list will be offered the job and remainder will keep aside in case the preferred applicants declines the job offer.
 Interviews (cont.)

• There are also national differences in the number of people involved in the
interviews and who they are. Thus an HRM specialist would often be one of the
interviewers in northern Europe; less commonly so elsewhere. There can be
important cross-cultural differences (Sparrow 2006).
• For example, one US MNC, when recruiting managers in Korea, found that interviewers
had to be trained in cross-cultural awareness. It is the cultural norm in Korea, when asked a
'good' question, to keep silent as a sign of respect. The better the question, the longer the
period of silence the candidate maintains. In US culture, if you ask a good question and are
met with silence, you do not attribute the behaviour to respect but to ignorance. Face-to-
face interviews can create quite distorted judgements.
 ASSESSMENT CENTRES

• Many organizations designed to assess employees promotability for the purpose of

selection of suitable candidates to fill job vacancy.
• They conduct activities and exercises as the purpose to observe the best candidates
for the job offer.
• Test the communication skills, social etiquette, leadership, creativity, persuasiveness,
ability to and stress.
 PSYCHOLOGICAL TESTING

• The use of psychological tests has become an increasing problem in the international selection
field. In the pursuit of the global manager, organizations have to look outside their normal
recruitment territory in order to benchmark interview candidates. Because they are aware that
interviews or behaviourally based work simulations are subject to culturally different behaviours,
from both the candidates and the assessor, international HR managers might be tempted to use more
testing. On the surface, psychological tests may be seen as a way of avoiding the subjective bias of
other options. Indeed, greater international mobility of candidates has increased the demand for
tests to be used on job applicants from a number of different countries, and most test producers now
sell their products internationally.
• There is also the problem of fairness using testing, in which candidates to whom inappropriate
testing has been applied can find that they do not progress as well through internal selection
systems. Such discrimination is equally inappropriate. Countries also differ greatly in terms of the
practices related to user qualification, legal and statutory constraints on test use and the
consequences for those tested, and controls exercised over the use of tests.
 OTHER SELECTION TEST

1. Performance Test : purpose is to check that a candidate has specific abilities that he says he has. E.g.:
driving test and computer usage test
2. Aptitude test: to discover a person’s potential abilities and talents. E.g.: accounts clerks need numerical
aptitudes
3. Personality test : measure how well the applicants will perform at the organization based on their interpersonal
skills, the motivation and inspiration that drive them, and the role that they can excel in due to their behavioral traits.
E.g.: a salesperson may be asked to take a personality test

4. Intelligence test: A questionnaire or series of exercises designed to measure intelligence. There are
many types of intelligence tests, and they may measure learning and/or ability in a wide variety of areas
and skills.
5. Medical test: to determine whether they are physically fit for the job being offered and whether they
have any diseases that could be a problem once they are employed. E.g.: a colour blindness test is
crucial for electrical and laboratory technicians
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 EXPATRIATE FAILURE AND SUCCESS

• Expatriate failure and success are obviously critical and related issues for global
firms. Considering the major determinants for expatriate failure clarifies the links to
expatriate success. First, there are three questions related to failure:
• Its definition,
• The magnitude of the phenomenon
• The costs associated with failure.
• What do we mean by expatriate failure?
• The term expatriate failure has been defined as the premature return of an expatriate (that
is, a return home before the period of assignment is completed). In such a case, an
expatriate failure represents a selection error, often compounded by ineffective expatriate
management policies.

• What is the magnitude of the phenomenon we call expatriate failure?

• The Brookfield Report 2010 provides several indicators for expatriate failure. Firms
indicated that 6% of expatriate assignments were regarded as failures. The survey also
reported that expatriate turnover was about 17% during the international assignment,
28% within the first year upon repatriation, 23% between the first and the second year and
22% after two years. Locations with the highest expatriate failure rates were China (12%),
India (10%) and the USA (8%).
• What are the costs of failure?
• The costs of expatriate failure can be both direct and indirect.
• Direct costs include airfares and associated relocation expenses, and salary and
training.
• The ‘invisible’ or indirect costs are harder to quantify in money terms but can prove
to be more expensive for firms.
• Many expatriate positions involve contact with host government officials and key clients.
Failure at this level may result in loss of market share, difficulties with host-government
officials, and demands that expatriates be replaced with HCNs (thus affecting the
multinational’s general staffing approach).
• The possible effect on local staff is also an indirect cost factor, since morale and productivity
could suffer.
• Failure also has an effect on the expatriate concerned, who may lose self-esteem, self-
confidence, and prestige among peers. Future performance may be marked by decreased
motivation, lack of promotional opportunities and perhaps increased productivity to
compensate for the failure.
 SELECTION CRITERIA
• It should be noted that selection is a two-way process between the individual and the
organization. A prospective candidate may reject the expatriate assignment, either
for individual reasons, such as family considerations, or for situational factors, such as
the perceived toughness of a particular culture. It is a challenge for those responsible
for selecting staff for international assignments to determine appropriate selection
criteria.
Family
requirements

Cross-cultural
Language
suitability

FIGURE C: Factors
in expatriate
selection Technical ability
Selection Country/cultural
decision requirements
• Techincal ability
• Naturally, an employee’s ability to perform the required tasks of a particular job is an
important selection factor. Technical and managerial skills are therefore an essential
criterion.

• Cross-cultural suitability: Competence, adjustment and other indicators

• The cultural environment in which expatriates operate is an important factor for
determining successful performance. Here, intercultural competence and related concepts
as well as the ability to adjust to a foreign culture play important roles.
• Example of the ability:
• Soft skills
• Intercultural competence
• Intercultural competence and related concepts
• The ability to adjust to a foreign culture
✓ Soft skills. Soft skills are a criterion which is underestimated by many MNEs.92 They
are a precondition for intercultural competence. include psychological as well as
personal features, international experience and language knowledge.
✓ Intercultural competence. Expatriates require cross-cultural abilities that enable
the person to operate in a new environment and to guarantee the functioning of
culturally diverse teams.94 This is often expressed by using the term intercultural
competence, which is defined as ‘the ability to function effectively in another culture’.
✓ Intercultural competence and related concepts. Closely related to intercultural
competence is the concept of cultural intelligence. Ang et al.100 define cultural
intelligence as ‘a specific form of intelligence focused on capabilities to grasp,
reason and behave effectively in situations characterised by cultural diversity’.
✓ The ability to adjust to a foreign culture. Today, we differentiate between two
kinds of adjustment: psychological adjustment, which is measured with respect to the
psychological well-being of the expatriate; and socio-cultural adjustment, which
describes the ability to interact successfully in the foreign country.
• Family Requirements.
• the interaction between expatriate, spouse/partner and family members’ various
adjustment experiences is now well documented.
• It should be pointed out that the spouse (or accompanying partner) often carries a heavy
burden. Upon arrival in the country of assignment, the responsibility for settling the family
into its new home falls on the spouse, who may have left behind a career, along with
friends and social support networks (particularly relatives). apart from the accompanying
partner’s career, there are other family considerations that can cause a potential expatriate
to decline the international assignment.
• Disruption to children’s education is an important consideration, and the selected
candidate may reject the offered assignment on the grounds that a move at this particular
stage in his or her child’s life is inappropriate. The care of aging or invalid parents is
another consideration.
• Country/Cultural requirements.
• Changing in the legislation to facilitate employment-related immigration which will make
international transfers either easier or difficults. It is important that HR staff keep up-to-
date with relevant legislative changes in the countries in which the MNE is involved.

• Language
• The ability to speak the local language is an aspect often linked with cross-cultural ability.
Nevertheless, mastering the local language is most often not the most important
qualification with respect to languages. Lack of fluency in the corporate language,
therefore, can be a selection barrier. Prospective candidates may be eliminated from the
potential pool due to a lack of at least competency in the common language. Language
ability therefore may limit the organization’s ability to select the most appropriate
candidate.