Recruiting

• Pages: 936-937

Page 936

Recruiting in the broadest sense is the activity of acquiring new employees to fill a job "from the outside." Filling jobs internally is usually referred to as transferring, reassigning, or promoting people. Recruitment will be more intensive if the job to be filled is "permanent." Temporary hires and the act of engaging contractors to do a job tend to be less demanding because mistakes can be more easily corrected. But every serious organization looks at "new hires" as adding an important resource. The higher the responsibilities associated with the new job or the higher the skills required to do it, the more difficult the process will be. Recruiting, narrowly considered, consists of the first two steps in the total hiring process itself, which consists of 1) job definition and description, 2) sourcing of individuals by various means, 3) interviewing employees, 4) selection of individuals, 5) making the offer and negotiating the details, and 6) introducing the new employee and providing necessary initial training if that is required.

Elsewhere in this volume the hiring process is treated as a whole under the heading of Employee Hiring. Recruiting, the front end of the process, will be discussed more fully here: the shaping of the entire effort and then the creation and narrowing of a pool of candidates for consideration.

Job Definition

Recruiting is usually triggered when an employee resigns or is released or when the workload grows and makes the need for additional help obvious. Replacing existing employees is relatively easier because the function to be fulfilled by the new hire is well-known and therefore easy to describe. Depending on the level of administrative formality practiced by the small business, a job description may already exist; if the job was created by a recruitment process a few years or months earlier, the text of the original recruitment ads may still be around. Setting about the job definition, therefore, is relatively easy. It requires review, of course, and possibly updating and revision, especially if the job "evolved" during its history and the person now being replaced carries out different tasks than those for which he or she was originally engaged.

Brand-new jobs need definition. This task is often neglected, however, because managers simply assume they know exactly what they want. If neglected, the job...