Assessing Theories and Practices in Recruitment, Selection and Essay

Assessing Theories and Practices in Recruitment, Selection and Diversity Management - Essay Example Every human resource department desires to be able to hire the best fitting person for the job in terms of skills, attitude and personality. Thus companies find ways to develop and benchmark among various "good practices" in their recruitment and selection processes. This paper lays down some good practices and analyses underlying processes and theories focusing on the management of recruitment and selection programs. The paper also discusses diversity management and its effects on the program's outcomes. Companies continuously strategise to determine their competitive edge in the business world. Likewise, they need to continuously analyse the strength of their workforce including the gaps between supply and demand of available workers. Planning is a proactive move and a strategic activity that enables company to identify the needed critical skills and forecast the activities that will generate these needed critical skills. (Revelle 1995) Through the strategic workforce planning, companies will be armed with the information: what the company needs and what people will be available to meet those needs. Recruitment Processes "Garbage in - garbage out." (Armstrong 2006) Many problems in the workplace may be traced from poor workforce planning and poor implementation of the recruitment and selection programs. Many businesses, particularly those without properly installed human resource departments are guilty of these and they realize it too late when they already have unproductive and troublesome employees in their midst. Recruitment is one major function of the human resource department. It is the process of "finding the right people for the right job". (McNamara 1997) The Selection process is usually tagged along with the recruitment process together because of the interrelatedness of the functions. The recruitment aspect focuses on locating and inviting the prospective applicants. Dr. Paul R. Bernthal of Development Dimensions International gave the definition of recruitment as "the process of identifying and attracting a group of potential candidates from within and outside the organization to evaluate for employment." (2002) Once these candidates are identified then employment selection process begins. A research conducted in 2002 by Dr. Bernthal on 573 member companies of the Electronic Recruiting Exchange made important findings on best practices and trends in recruitment as well as in selection. (2002) Among the findings were that companies tend to hire external than internal candidates. This is true to mid or senior level positions. It is understandable for companies to prefer external candidates because many companies need additional skills and new breeds in their workforce. After thorough inventory of employees' skills, most companies find need for additional skills into the company thus they most often prefer to hire new employees than fill vacant positions with those from the ranks. Another finding from the DDI research was that most organizations are agreeable to increase their funds for human resource development particularly in their recruitment and selection programs. About 33% of human resource funds is allocated for recruitment and about 18% for selection processes. (Bernthal 2002) Many companies are already conscious of the importance of proper recruitment proces