1. Introduction
This review is guided by four main considerations. First, that recruitment and selection are a priori central to the management of human resources in growing firms. It is an unusual firm that increases its financial turnover or sales without having to recruit new members of staff, often urgently. Second, that small growth firms are most often characterised as such by economic or financial measures, and that such measures are often transferred to assessment of the efficacy of HRM practices. However recruitment and selection is a managerial practice that has effects beyond the firm, with particular implications for social justice. I suggest that conventional approaches to gauging the success of recruitment and selection procedures neglect the societal obligations of managers and employees to work towards social justice through equal opportunities. Recruitment and selection form the permeable border between society and organization, or labour market and labour process (Jewson & Mason, 1986). I therefore argue for an alternative form of measurement that involves balancing internal demands for employee ‘fit’ and external, societal demands for fairness