107. Recruitment and Selection
Concept
The decision to bring people into your organization is one of the most important decisions you make. Because they are the people who will implement your purpose, vision, and strategy, and because once in, it’s harder to get them out.
There are several phases to hiring. First is recruitment. How do you develop a pool of reasonable candidates from which to choose? You can advertise, but that will get you a wide range of candidates many of whom are not at all suitable. Recruiters may get hundreds of resumes a day from advertising and then they have to sift through them. You could use an online recruiting service,39 but then you are delegating the winnowing of your pool to someone else. You could rely on current successful alumni to recruit for you at their alma maters, but then you may be unnecessarily limiting your scope, plus you are putting recent graduates who are not professional recruiters on the front line of an important function. You could send a cadre of recruiters to the top schools, but then there is significant expense attendant. You could delegate your recruitment to a recruiting firm who will interview you about desired characteristics and then do the pool generation and winnowing for you. Big data techniques are becoming more popular as firms try to sift through multiple sources and large pools of matches.40 Finally, more and more companies are using social media to find good candidates.41
Second is selection. Once you have a reasonably manageable pool of candidates, how do you winnow and finally select the right candidate. Most companies use a variety of interviews, remote and on-site at headquarters. These interviews might include psychological testing, oneon-one, one-on-many, presentations, or action/behavioral assessments. All of which can be and often is intimidating to the young candidate. Psychological testing attempts to measure key personality characteristics requested by the employer. One-on-many interviews save time for the employer and may be used intentionally to measure reaction to stress. Behavioral interviews may include time in job, problem solving, and time with teammates to see how candidates actually think and work.42
One thing many recruiters and candidates overlook is how well the candidate knows him or herself and how well they can present that knowledge in the midst of the recruiting processes. Candidates who try to “fake it until they make it”43 or who don’t know what they really want/need to succeed can make the process even more difficult than it inherently is. A candidate who has taken a course like “Self-Assessment and Career Development”44 and has a data-based list durable life themes is well-armed and deeply prepared to be a partner in the recruiting process—in which the goal is to find a good fit between candidate skills and employers’ job demands. When either candidate or recruiter enter interviews believing that the other is trying to deceive the other, it’s hard to find good fits.
Recruiting deception is not limited to candidates trying to give them what they want. Recruiters also try to put their best foot forward, and in so doing, too often disappoint new hires who find out later that the full-court press including time with the C-Level officers was just for the courtship—and evaporates post marriage. The realization of having been had or manipulated is not a good way for any relationship to begin.
I once made a study of recruiter forms. They varied from a blank page to 10 pages of detailed criteria.45
The hiring process is not over when an offer is made. Both sides still need to hammer out the details. There are lots of details. Things like signing bonuses, moving expenses, health care, vacation time, working conditions, location, salary, immediate boss,46 and more. Once both parties agree to those details, and a handshake or signature is given, the candidate is in. He or she has crossed the organizational boundary/membrane and gone inside.
Third is on-boarding or socialization. Once a new hire arrives at work, many things begin. Whether they are planned or not varies widely from firm to firm. Where does the candidate go?47 Oh, there’s fingerprinting? Papers to sign for health care and retirement funds? Meeting your boss? Getting supplies? Learning what’s acceptable behavior and what’s not? How to dress? Where the rest rooms are? Cafeteria? Fitting into the corporate culture. This process, partly planned, partly not planned, goes on until the new hire feels that they have become aware of how to work in the firm. That might take weeks, months, or years. Dalton, Thompson, and Price called this stage the apprenticeship.48 Employers might say it has a finite end, however, in reality, the end of the socialization process is usually not recognized on either side. It just emerges into awareness when one day the newbie is no longer a newbie—and recruitment is over.
Example
A student in my careers class one fall came to me late term and said, “I had a job when I came back from my summer internship. I got a huge signing bonus. After developing my life themes and using them to analyze my job, I’ve realized I’ve made a bad decision. I’ve sent back my signing bonus and informed the firm that I won’t be coming. I wish I’d had this information before I went recruiting.” That was a big event for that student and for me. It underscored the importance of the well-informed partnership necessary in effective recruiting.49
Another student called me six months into his job complaining that despite the excitement he had while interviewing with the chief executive and the fancy dinners, he was now stuck in a small windowless room with a boring assignment and wishing he had paid more attention to the details instead of the prestige and money.
Diagram
Challenge
1. Describe your organization’s recruiting process.
2. Describe your company’s selection process.
3. Describe your company’s socialization process.
4. What is the average job satisfaction rating of your company’s employees?
5. How if at all would you modify those processes?
39 https://inc.com/john-rampton/9-ways-to-recruiting-top-talent-that-grow-businesses.html
40 https://thebalance.com/data-driven-decision-making-to-improve-recruiting-4153980
41 https://betterteam.com/social-recruiting-tips
42 https://thebalance.com/behavioral-interviews-525761
43 I’ve had MBA students declare this as their strategy in job-hunting and early career financial success. I always advised against this approach and was surprised at how many students adopt this avenue.
44 https://faculty.darden.virginia.edu/clawsonj/FindingFIT.html
45 Clawson, J. et al. 1990. Chapter 27 “Interviewing.” In Self-Assessment and Career Development, 3 ed. Englewood Cliffs: NJ, Prentice-Hall.
46 Dissatisfaction with bosses is the cause of enormous financial and energy losses and turnover, https://usnews.com/news/blogs/data-mine/2015/04/03/why-workers-hate-their-bosses
47 You would think this would be a no brainer, but I have had many MBA students who reported for work and no one knew they were coming and had no space for them.
48 https://sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/009026167790033X
49 https://blog.capterra.com/top-15-recruiting-statistics-2014/