Chapter 5 Recruitment

Recruitment as HR Process

In medium-sized and large organizations, recruitment is usually managed by the HR department. The goal of recruitment is twofold. First, HR practitioners must ensure that enough potential applicants are aware of and apply for a position to generate an adequate number of applicants. If the applicant pool is too small, then an organization might not be able to hire a qualified person. Second, HR practitioners must ensure that the applicant pool comprises people with the required KSAs for the position. Ensuring that over- or under-qualified applicants self-select out of a job competition reduces the organizational costs of screening applicants during the selection process. It is important to remember that potential applicants also use the recruiting process to learn about the organization and, based on what they learn, decide whether or not they would like to work there.

Figure 5.1 offers a visual representation of the recruitment process and demonstrates its connections to other HR processes. A recruitment strategy must be aligned with an organization’s broader business strategy (see Chapter 1). For example, an organization that pursues a differentiation strategy based on offering high-quality customer service will almost certainly have a different recruitment strategy compared with an organization that has adopted a cost-leader strategy.

Importantly, Figure 5.1 illustrates that recruitment does not begin when the HR department is asked to post a job advertisement. Rather, recruitment begins when HR practitioners develop a recruiting strategy informed by other HR functions. The specific tools, methods, and actions adopted to recruit applicants should flow from this strategy.

The process of job analysis (see Chapter 3) will determine the nature of the job as well as the required KSAs of applicants. Job design can shape the potential pool of applicants. For example, high-paying jobs that can be performed remotely might attract a large pool of applicants. Low-paying jobs that must be performed in a specific region might draw applicants only from the locally available pool of workers.

Finally, an organization’s human resources plan (see Chapter 4) and staffing needs identified by managers will inform the number of positions that must be filled and identify external factors that will affect recruitment. For example, organizations that seek to increase the proportion of their workforces drawn from traditionally under-represented groups (e.g., Indigenous people, women, or workers of colour) might need to take specific steps to recruit applicants from these groups. Similarly, it is important to know whether the recruitment will take place in a context of labour shortage or oversupply.

Recruiting Strategy

The purpose of a recruiting strategy is to ensure that an adequate applicant pool is available for the selection process. When deciding how to go about recruiting staff, HR practitioners must consider several factors. First, they need to know which positions need to be filled. This includes understanding the requirements of the positions and the number of hires required. Then they need to consider the availability of candidates with the required KSAs for the position and where to find them. These factors can guide the recruiting methods that they adopt. Not surprisingly, organizations often employ different recruiting strategies for different jobs.

For example, if an organization wants to hire a small number of candidates who have KSAs not widely available, then an HR practitioner might consider looking inside the organization (i.e., internal recruiting) or adopting a more focused external recruiting strategy (e.g., hiring a search firm, buying targeted advertising, or using existing workers’ professional networks). In contrast, if an organization wants to hire a large number of candidates, and there are many potential applicants with the required KSAs, then an HR practitioner might rely on unsolicited applications, untargeted advertising, and online postings.

These examples illustrate the need to identify the recruiting methods most likely to secure an adequate number of qualified applicants at the lowest possible cost. Although cost is an important constraint in developing a recruiting strategy, there are additional factors to consider. Other HR goals (e.g., increasing the demographic diversity of the workforce) can affect the recruiting strategy and suggest that alternative or additional methods are required. Feature Box 5.1 discusses diversity in the workplace. Organizational policies can also constrain the methods available. For example, an organization that prioritizes recruiting from within will start with that strategy.

Incorporating non-traditional HR goals, such as increasing diversity, can be challenging in developing a recruitment strategy. If the organization has no experience or no internal resources for how to meet those goals, then it might not know how to start. One method to achieve such goals is to reconsider whom the organization has traditionally targeted for recruitment and consciously make efforts to reach out to new networks and groups. Organizations can also turn to external consultants for assistance in incorporating diversity into recruitment and selection.

Recruiting strategies must also grapple with an organization’s reputation in the broader community. Organizations might have a macrolevel reputation (sometimes referred to as their brand). Many large corporations work hard to establish brands. A brand includes how the organization is perceived as an employer. When you think of Google, what do you think of? Likely you think of a “fun” and empowered workplace, with nap pods, video games, ping pong tables, and flexible work hours. That is part of Google’s brand, and it feeds into its recruitment strategy. Even though recent reports highlight that Google’s working conditions include sexual harassment and employee protests, the images that the name evokes continue to be powerful.8 That is the power of a brand. Google has to process hundreds of unsolicited job applications a day, attributable to its strong brand.

Organizations also have reputations at the microlevel. Workers, customers, and neighbours have direct experiences with an organization—about how well workers are treated, customer service, or product quality. Collectively, these perceptions make up an organization’s reputation in a community, and that, too, can affect recruitment. If the local community widely believes that the organization is a “bad employer,” then it will be harder to attract candidates. In a way, the microlevel reputation can be more difficult for an organization to correct as it operates through informal channels and networks. Conversely, a positive reputation in a community can make recruitment easier. A recruitment strategy needs to take into account whether the employer is perceived positively or negatively by the pool of potential workers from which it is recruiting.

Practically speaking, a recruitment strategy might need to respond to an organization’s reputation by reinforcing a positive belief about the organization, highlighting a little-known aspect, or countering a negative perception. For example, if the organization has had a high-profile, bitter strike with its workers, then the recruitment strategy immediately after it might need to incorporate the union’s assistance or demonstrate a degree of goodwill for working collaboratively with the union going forward. Similarly, if the organization has made a major contribution to its community, then a recruitment strategy might be able to leverage the resulting goodwill.

Once a recruiting strategy has been developed, often it can be reused to fill subsequent vacancies, assuming that the considerations driving the strategy remain valid. A challenge for HR practitioners is that organizational recruiting strategies can fossilize yet be used even when they are no longer appropriate. For example, the declining importance of daily newspapers in the lives of Canadians might suggest that relying on newspaper advertisements is no longer an effective use of advertising dollars. The techniques discussed at the end of this chapter can provide data to assess the effectiveness of existing techniques and the internal political capital necessary for HR practitioners to drive changes in recruiting behaviour.

Internal Recruitment

Internal recruitment is the process of drawing from existing employees to fill positions. Many organizations, in particular larger enterprises with sophisticated HR departments, utilize promotions and lateral transfers as preferred methods for filling vacancies. Internal recruiting has four advantages for organizations.

• • Cost: The organization does not have to advertise the position, and internal hires require much less training and orientation.
• • Risk: Past performance is often a reliable predictor of future job success. Internal hires are known quantities, and organizations can make more accurate evaluations of their potential compared with external candidates.
• • Incentive: The potential for promotion can incentivize behaviour desired by the organization among other employees, such as exerting extra effort or complying with directions that a worker might otherwise find objectionable.
• • Loyalty: Opportunities for growth and advancement in an organization can make workers more loyal to the organization and, consequently, work harder, thereby reducing turnover.

Internal recruitment is most effective when the organization has valid and reliable measures of workers’ past performance and an inventory of their KSAs. For these reasons, internal recruitment can be linked closely with training (see Chapter 7) and performance management (see Chapter 9). Internal recruitment is also more effective when workers believe that the process of selection is fair. For example, many unionized workplaces have seniority provisions embedded in a collective agreement negotiated by the employer and the union. These provisions make the duration of a worker’s service a factor (to varying degrees) in determining eligibility for promotion or transfer. Provisions that make clear factors to be considered in promotion decisions and the process by which decisions are made increase the transparency and fairness of decisions. Although seniority provisions are often criticized as undermining merit-based staffing practices, in practice they have complex effects, associated with lower turnover and higher overall wages, as well as mixed effects on productivity.9

There are four main methods of internal recruitment.

1. 1. Internal job posting: Distributing a job posting to existing employees is a transparent way to generate a list of interested candidates. Internal job postings rely on applicants to self-select. Self-selection can mean that some qualified candidates will not apply and that some unqualified candidates will apply. Even a rudimentary career development process (see Chapter 7) can improve understanding among workers of the jobs for which they are qualified.
2. 2. Succession planning: A succession plan identifies and tracks potential successors for important positions, including an evaluation of their suitability. The replacement charts discussed in Chapter 4 are an example of succession planning. When a vacancy occurs, qualified candidates can be approached directly.
3. 3. HR systems: Organizations possess large amounts of information about their workers (e.g., addresses, social insurance numbers, wages, and benefits). Some organizations also compile data on performance, KSAs, and interests to identify and evaluate candidates for promotions or transfers. This approach makes internal recruitment more efficient but less transparent. The measures recorded in a database are likely limited and can result in overlooking suitable candidates whose strengths might not be recorded.
4. 4. Nominations: Asking someone (e.g., a supervisor) with knowledge of both the position and the workers to recommend someone can be an efficient way to identify potential candidates. Because of a lack of clear criteria, nominations can be unreliable and invalid and appear to be unfair. Furthermore, they can replicate existing inequities in the workplace since powerful actors are likely to put forward the names of their protégés and allies. Despite these shortcomings, nominations are one of the most common methods of internal recruitment because this approach is quick and allows powerful organizational actors to extend their influence in the workplace.

Selecting an internal recruiting method often requires trading efficiency with transparency. Internal recruiting can also be politically complex, with internal stakeholders sometimes exerting pressure to have their preferred candidates selected. Furthermore, unsuccessful internal candidates might remain in the workplace and bear some animus toward the successful candidate or decide to seek employment elsewhere.

Internal recruitment might not be appropriate if the position requires highly specialized skills that no one else in the organization is likely to have. For example, it might not be possible to find an internal replacement for the sole IT technician at a toy manufacturing company because none of the other employees was hired for their IT skills. Internal recruitment also tends to reproduce existing skills, attitudes, and perspectives because candidates are already immersed in the organization’s culture. External recruitment might be more desirable for an organization that experiences rapid industry change, begins a new line of business, or seeks to diversify its workforce or change its culture.10 External recruiting can also be required if internal recruiting does not (or is unlikely to) yield a satisfactory candidate.

External Recruitment

External recruitment refers to the process of communicating with people outside the organization to attract candidates to fill a vacant position. External recruitment is inevitable for any organization. Even if internal recruiting fills a vacancy, it creates a new vacancy to fill. And, sometimes, there are simply too many vacancies (or too few qualified internal candidates) for an organization to rely on internal hiring. External recruitment is more expensive and time-consuming than internal recruitment. It also entails a higher risk of making a bad hiring decision because the employer has much less and lower-quality information—much of it gleaned second hand from resumés, interviews, and references—on which to base a selection. Nevertheless, by broadening the potential labour pool outside the organization, external recruitment can bring new perspectives, experiences, and skills into the organization.

There are eight main methods of external recruiting.

1. 1. Unsolicited applications: Employers regularly receive resumés from individuals seeking work, by mail or email or when applicants visit a worksite in person. Some organizations might triage such applications and retain those resumés that fit expected vacancies.
2. 2. Advertising: Advertising job vacancies in newspapers and magazines or on the radio, billboards, buses, and the internet can be an effective way to reach a large audience. The rate at which views are converted to applications, however, can be low unless ads target likely candidates.
3. 3. Online postings: More than half of Canadian job seekers report looking for work online.11 This includes searching organizations’ websites, looking at job-posting aggregator websites (e.g., Monster.com), and using social media. Paid online advertising can be both more tightly targeted and less costly than traditional print advertising.12 The reach of online advertising creates the risk that an organization will be flooded with applications from unqualified candidates. To reduce the resulting costs of selection, organizations might need to develop a system for quickly filtering out frivolous applications.
4. 4. Job fairs: Job fairs bring together employers (often by industry or geography) and potential workers (e.g., the one at the Saddledome in the opening vignette). Although job fairs can be time consuming, they allow organizations to interact directly with applicants. This lets an organization put its best foot forward and make preliminary assessments of candidates.
5. 5. Educational institutions: Postsecondary institutions offer career services for students. Accessing job posting boards and campus career fairs can be an effective way to recruit educated but inexperienced employees.
6. 6. Employment agencies: Some employers contract with employment agencies to find applicants. Executive search firms (sometimes called headhunters) can help employers to find new senior executives. Although convenient, executive search firms are expensive and tend to focus on moving existing executives around rather than seeking new talent. At the other end of the spectrum are temporary employment agencies that have a roster of workers available for short-term assignments (alleviating the need for recruitment and selection). The fee for “temps” dispatched to an organization is often 20% to 30% of the salary paid to the worker. The worker often remains an employee of the temp agency and can face contractual barriers to accepting permanent work with the contracting organization.
7. 7. Employee referrals: Existing employees can be effective recruiters, especially if an organization provides a financial incentive when a referral is hired. Employees are more likely to recommend someone to work for an organization that they themselves consider to be a good employer. But referrals also tend to perpetuate the existing demographic make-up of the organization.
8. 8. Professional associations/unions: Many professional associations provide job postings to their members. This can be an effective way to recruit applicants with specific credentials. Similarly, many unions have hiring halls that coordinate the provision of workers for jobs. Hiring halls are most common in construction, in which building trades workers tend to work on time-limited projects and the union provides a useful service in connecting them to the next project. Some maritime, printing, and professional unions also have hiring halls.

Table 5.1 shows the external recruiting methods used by Canadian employers and how they have changed in the past few years. Of particular note is that, though online methods are growing in popularity, informal methods continue to be an important source of applicants for employers. The decline of newspaper advertising is also notable.

On the worker side, although 45% of workers report applying for work online, between 70% and 85% of jobs are still filled through informal networks (mostly since most job openings are never publicly posted).14 So, though the internet has become a key tool in recruitment, employers are wise to keep in mind that informal avenues of finding and attracting candidates continue to be a crucial part of a recruitment strategy.

Job Postings

A job posting is a descriptive summary of a position, its requirements, and the conditions of work. It is required regardless of which recruiting method is used. The content of a job posting is normally derived from a job description and specification (see Chapter 3) and then modified to account for the requirements of the specific position for which the organization is recruiting. For example, if the Ministry of Labour is hiring a policy analyst, much of the job posting will be derived from the generic policy analyst job description and specification. But the job posting might also include position-specific requirements, such as knowledge of federal-provincial labour market training agreements and the location of the position. Job postings can sometimes be developed in other ways given time pressure or the inability to perform a sophisticated job analysis. For example, a supervisor might be tasked with quickly outlining the main duties and qualifications of a position.

Feature Box 5.3 contains the typical elements of a job posting along with an example of each element. The level of detail contained in a job posting will vary depending on where the posting is publicized (e.g., newspaper ads tend to be shorter than postings hosted on the company website). Although all postings need to provide basic information, a well-designed posting will provide the potential applicant with a clear picture of what the job will be like and the kind of candidate whom the organization is seeking. The more descriptive and precise the posting, the more effective it will be in attracting desired candidates and dissuading those not appropriate for the position. It is important to remember that the posting is the one opportunity that the organization has to persuade someone to apply. A well-constructed posting should give applicants a sense of the workplace and how they can expect to be treated by the employer. In other words, a job posting should be more than a listing of job attributes. It should be a promotional advertisement for the organization as a whole.

Applications

The purpose of recruitment is to generate a pool of qualified candidates for a job. Typically, organizations collect written information from each candidate. This information is then analyzed during the process of selection to identify potential hires for further consideration. As a result, any recruiting strategy must include a method of collecting applicant information. The most common approach is to request an application package that includes a cover letter, resumé, and, often, a list of references. Cover letters and resumés provide applicants with significant latitude to share relevant information but entail higher costs for an organization given the time required to analyze applications. Asking for cover letters and resumés might be appropriate when the number of applicants is expected to be smaller and when there is a need for a deeper understanding of their experience and aptitudes.

An alternative is to require candidates to complete a standardized application form (either paper or electronic). Application forms collect specific information that the employer is seeking in a standardized format. In addition to basic personal information, the form might ask for previous work experience, education and other certification, and whether the candidate meets job-specific criteria (e.g., a valid driver’s licence). It might also ask for references. Application forms are useful when there are many positions to be filled or the job is relatively straightforward and less information is needed to make a decision. The forms can be processed quickly given the standardized format.

In designing an application form, it is important that the form collects only information relevant to making a selection. This means that the form should be structured such that any information on personal characteristics listed as protected grounds in human rights legislation (e.g., age, ethnoracial background, gender) is defensible as necessary for the process of selection. Table 5.2 presents some sample application form questions with commentary on potential pitfalls and proposes alternative questions. In developing an application form, it is important to be mindful that questions can also indirectly reveal inappropriate information. For example, asking for the date that someone graduated from high school could reveal their age.

Electronic applications are a convenient and effective mechanism. Web-based applications can force applicants to complete them fully before submission as well as allow them to upload documents. Electronic applications also allow organizations to store, process, and share applications internally. (We will discuss in the next chapter the effects of online applications on selection procedures.) Care must be taken to protect the uploaded data to prevent breaches of the applicants’ privacy. Feature Box 5.4 examines the broader issue of privacy in the recruitment process.

Evaluating Recruitment Efforts

Evaluating recruitment efforts allows an organization to understand and improve its performance. An important question, though, is how to define the word effective. Simply asking “did the position get filled?” does not generate information that can be used to guide future recruitment efforts. And it is important to distinguish between recruitment and selection functions. A wildly successful recruitment effort that generates lots of qualified candidates might not result in a hire because of something that happened during selection.

To determine how to evaluate a recruiting process, HR practitioners should start by identifying the goals and context of the recruitment. For example, they might ask how many applications from qualified candidates the organization was trying to generate. Was finding candidates from a particular demographic group a priority? Were there any special events or issues (e.g., skills shortage, undesirable job characteristics, organizational scandals) that might have affected recruitment? The goals and context help to determine which evaluation technique should be used and how its results should be interpreted.

There are a number of common measures used to evaluate recruitment efforts. Yield ratios measure the percentage of candidates who move through each stage of the recruitment and selection processes for each recruitment method utilized. This allows us to compare the effectiveness of different methods of advertising. For example, if a recruiter has to fill 10 vacancies, then the recruiter might use both newspaper ads and website postings to draw attention to the vacancies. For each approach, the recruiter might measure the total number of applications generated, the number of applications by candidates who meet the qualifications for the job, and the number of successful applicants. The results of such an analysis are set out in Table 5.3.

In this example, the website generated twice as many applications as the newspaper ad. The website also generated a greater proportion of minimally qualified applicants (30%) than the newspaper ad (20%). But applicants who responded to the newspaper ad were more likely to be hired (10%) than applicants who responded to the website (5%). If the recruitment goal was to maximize the number of acceptable candidates to review, then the website performed better. If the goal was to maximize the proportion of applicants who are hired, then the newspaper ad was a more effective recruitment method.

A second way to assess recruitment is to determine the cost per applicant or hire of different recruiting methods. Table 5.4 continues the website and newspaper example and suggests that the website posting had a much lower cost per applicant, per qualified applicant, and per hire than the newspaper ad. In determining the cost of each method, it is worthwhile to consider both direct costs (e.g., charge for an advertisement) and indirect costs (e.g., staff time used).

The yield ratio and cost-per-hire data allow HR practitioners to consider whether newspaper advertising is worthwhile in the future. In determining this, it is useful to know whether it would have been possible to fill all 10 positions from the 30 applicants generated by the website posting. And, if it was possible, then it would be useful to know whether doing so would (or did) result in a significantly less qualified applicant pool. Answering these questions might require discussions with the selection committee and/or an analysis of the hired and rejected applicants.

In theory, an organization that seeks to increase the diversity of the candidate pool might evaluate the degree to which its recruiting efforts generated applicants from each targeted group. The data might then be compared with the demographic make-up of the organization or labour market. In practice, collecting demographic data with which to categorize applicants can be problematic. Although candidates can be asked to self-declare whether they fit into a specific equity category, some candidates will be reluctant to do so because of fear of discrimination. Some employers encourage self-disclosure by making statements in the job ad that encourage candidates of diverse backgrounds to apply for jobs. Ascribing certain characteristics to applicants through observation (e.g., based on a name, photo, or personal presentation during an interview) is a fraught process and best avoided.

Organizations interested in improving their recruitment and selection processes might also query candidates about their experiences with different aspects of the process (e.g., ease of application, clarity of communication, timeliness of response). However, it is important to keep in mind that such inquiries gather information only from candidates who have applied, thereby excluding potential candidates who self-selected out of the competition. This exclusion suggests that the utility of information collected from such inquiries might be limited.

Conclusion

Successful recruitment takes planning, understanding of the economic and organizational context, and careful implementation. Although recruitment might seem to be a straightforward HR function, and in many ways it is, organizations can make mistakes, usually because of inadequate planning. It is easy to get swamped with too many applications or not to get the attention of the best candidates.

Amazon’s recruiting woes in the opening vignette suggest a number of things about both recruitment and selection (the subject of Chapter 6). First, a key risk of recruiting is unintentionally replicating the existing staffing complement. Amazon did that by training its AI using historical data. But HR practitioners are also vulnerable to unconscious bias, which can influence how they structure job postings and where they look for applicants.16 Various forms of bias, and the errors that they can cause, are discussed in Chapter 6.

Second, though organizations face significant pressure to minimize costs, not every cost savings is a good idea. Although the example in Tables 5.3 and 5.4 suggests that it is a good idea to stop advertising in newspapers because of the high cost per hire, newspaper ads can provide access to an important pool of applicants. In the Amazon case, automating recruitment and selection looked like a great way to reduce HR costs. In practice, however, the system ended up working no better than the traditional approaches to recruiting that it was developed to replace.

Third, it is important to recall that workers are forming impressions of an organization while they are being recruited. A poor impression—whether caused by bad press, inadequate compensation, or a poorly presented or managed recruitment process—can cause workers to decide not to apply for a position. Potential applicants with lots of other options (i.e., generally the most desirable candidates) are likely to be the first to walk away from a job posting.