Blog Eleven - Recruitment

Blog 11 – Recruitment

Recruitment occurs in all businesses when looking for potential employees through a selection process to work for an organisation. Recruitment can also be referred to as generating a pool of capable people to apply to an organisation for employment. Selection is the process by which managers and others use specific instruments to choose a person from a pool of applicants who is most likely to succeed in the job (Gold and Bratton, 2003).

When commenting on the layout on the recruitment site fish4jobs.co.uk, the webpage displays vibrant colours attracting people to join the site and encourage their job search. The page also shows a breakdown of job sectors to search in making it more accessible to find what you are looking for. There are many adverts displayed on the page displaying different images and the page is helpful by giving contact details and areas in which to click on to log on to the site making it more accessible. The site also displays a breakdown of job titles of interest and different places in the country offering help and advice about job applications to benefit the searcher.

There are many companies which create e-recruitment campaigns to inform applicants of potential available job roles within their organisation. Mcdonald’s launched ‘My McJob Campaign’ as a recruitment drive to show customers the benefits and opportunities which can be gained from working at Mcdonald’s. This occurred after Mcdonald’s were seen to be offering low paid work with little skill requirements. Mcdonald’s took on board these attitudes and made a clever campaign as the meaning of ‘McJob’ is ‘an un stimulating, low-wage job with few benefits, especially in a service industry’ (Anon., 2012) . Therefore by using this phrase in their campaign, they showed that Mcdonald’s jobs differ from the meaning of the phrase and can offering a rewarding work life with option to adapt to a new career which diversifies from the original attitudes that many people have of the company encouraging more people to apply for jobs with Mcdonald’s and in the long run can alter the public image of the company.

When looking at examining an employees’ natural ability, tests are carried out such as verbal fluency and numerical ability. However businesses measure potential employees’ specific abilities using aptitude testing. These tests include examining verbal reasoning, numerical reasoning and inductive reasoning. ‘For many years, there has been a great deal of interest in the extent to which general mental ability and cognitive abilities can be shown to be valid in terms of prediction of performance and can be generalized across a range of occupations’(Bratton and Gold, 2007). Therefore aptitude tests can be important for businesses to find out if potential employees hold specific abilities which will best suit specific job roles within the company. Verbal reasoning tests include questions based mainly on statements which are to be answered according to whether the candidate believes the statement to be true or false. Numerical reason tests require candidates to answer questions based on statistical and numerical information given therefore examining a candidates numerical skills. These tests may benefit companies looking for employees to fill numerically based job roles such as accountants. Inductive reasoning tests examine a candidate’s problem solving skills.’ People who perform well on these tests tend to have a greater capacity to think conceptually as well as analytically’ (Anon., 2011).

Overall, there is a significant disadvantage to completing these tests before obtaining an interview as employees would have little opportunity to interact with the interviewer if they were dismissed according to their aptitude test results. Therefore specific skills and qualities of the applicant may have been missed through completion of the tests and therefore they would have been unfairly dismissed. This would have a negative effect on the applicant as they would be unable to take the job applied for and the interviewer would lose a potentially highly skilled employee which would have a negative effect on their long term productivity.

References

Anon. (2011) Inductive reasoning examples [online]. SHL Direct. Available from: http://www.shldirect.com/inductive_reasoning.html [Accessed: 4 May 2012].

Anon. (2012) Dictionary [online]. Dictionary.com. Available from: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/mcjob?s=t [Accessed: 4 May 2012].

Bratton, J. and Gold, J. (2007) Human resource management - Theory and Practice. 4th ed. China: Palgrace Macmillan.

Gold, J. and Bratton, J. (2003) Human resource management. 3rd ed. Bath: Palgrave Macmillan.