Personnel Policies
An organization’s personnel policies are its decisions about how it will carry out human resource management, including how it will fill job vacancies.
Several personnel policies are especially relevant to recruitment:
• Recruiting existing employees to fill vacancies or hiring from outside the organization
• Meeting or exceeding the market rate of pay
• Emphasizing job security or the right to terminate employees
• Images of the organization conveyed in its advertising
Internal versus External Recruiting
- Opportunities for advancement make a job more attractive to applicants and employees.
- As personnel policies, decisions about internal versus external recruiting affect the nature of jobs. Promote-from-within policies signal to job applicants that the company provides opportunities for advancement.
Lead-the-Market Pay Strategies
1. Pay is an important job characteristic for almost all applicants. Organizations have a recruiting advantage if their policy is to pay more than the current market wage for a job.
2. Increasingly, organizations that compete for applicants based on pay do so using forms of pay other than wages or salary.
Employment-at-Will Policies
1. Within the laws of the state where they are operating, employers have latitude to set policies about their rights in an employment relationship. A widespread policy follows the principle of employment at will, which holds that if there is no specific employment contract saying otherwise, the employer or employee may end an employment relationship at any time, regardless of cause.
2. An alternative to employment at will is to establish due-process policies. These policies formally lay out the steps an employee may take to appeal an employer’s decision to terminate that employee.
3. In decisions about employment-at-will policies, organizations should consider not only the legal advantages of employment at will but also the effect of such policies on recruitment.
Image Advertising
1. Advertising designed to create a generally favorable impression of the organization is called image advertising.
2. Image advertising is especially important for organizations in highly competitive labor markets that perceive themselves as having a bad image.
3. Whether the goal is to influence the perception of the public in general or specific segments of the labor market, job seekers form beliefs about the nature of the organization well before they have any direct interviewing with these companies.
Recruitment Sources
1. Another critical element of an organization’s recruitment strategy is its decisions about where to look for applicants.
2. The method and audiences the organization chooses for communicating its labor needs will determine the size and nature of the labor market the organization taps to fill its vacant positions.
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Internal Sources
1. An organization may emphasize internal or external sources of job applicants.
2. Internal sources are employees who currently hold other positions in the organization.
3. Organizations recruit existing employees through job postings – communicating information about vacancies on bulletin boards, in employee publications, on corporate intranets, and anywhere else the organization communicates with employees.
4. For the employer, relying on internal sources offers several advantages such as:
a. Generates applicants well known to the organization
b. Applicants are relatively knowledgeable about the organization’s vacancies
c. Faster and less expensive than external recruiting
External Sources
1. Organizations often have good reasons to recruit externally such as:
a. No internal recruits available
b. Bring in new ideas or new ways of doing business
2. Organizations often recruit through direct applicants and referrals, advertisements, employment agencies, schools, and Web sites.
3. Direct Applicants and Referrals: Direct applicants are people who apply for a vacancy without prompting from the organization. Referrals are people who apply because someone in the organization prompted them to do so.
4. One advantage is that many direct applicants are to some extent already “sold” on the organization. This process is called self-selection. A form of aided self-selection occurs with referrals.
5. Many job seekers use social networks to help find employment.
6. A benefit of such sources is that they cost less than formal recruiting efforts. Considering these combined benefits, referrals and direct applicants are among the best sources of new hires.
7. Some employers offer current employees financial incentives for referring applicants who are hire and perform acceptably on the job. Other companies play off their good reputations in the labor market to generate direct applicants.
8. A major downside of referrals is that they limit the likelihood of exposing the organization to fresh viewpoints.
9. Sometimes referrals contribute to hiring practices that appear unfair such as nepotism. This is the hiring of relatives.
10. Advertisements in Newspapers and Magazines: These ads typically generate a less desirable group of applicants than direct applicants or referrals and do so at greater expense.
11. Public Employment Agencies: Employers can register their job vacancies with their local state employment office and the agency will try to find someone suitable, using its computerized inventory of local unemployed individuals.
12 The government also provides funding to a variety of nonprofit employment agencies.
14. Private Employment Agencies: Private employment agencies provide much the same service as public employment agencies, but primarily serve the white-collar labor market.
15. Another difference between the two types of agencies is that private agencies charge employers for providing referrals.
16. For managers or professionals, an employer may use the services of a type of private agency called an executive search firm (ESF). People often call these agencies “headhunters”.
17. Employing an executive search firm may be expensive because of direct and indirect costs.
18. Colleges and Universities: On campus interviewing is the most important source of recruits for entry-level professional and managerial vacancies. Participating in university job fairs is another way of increasing the employer’s presence on campus.
19. Electronic Recruiting: The Internet has opened up new vistas for organizations trying to recruit talent. There are many ways to employ the Internet for recruiting. Figure 5.5 provides information taken from a survey of HR executives who responded to a survey and indicates the most effective source of recruits
20. One of the easiest ways to get into “e-cruiting” is simply to use the organization’s own Web site to solicit applicants.
Evaluating the Quality of a Source
1. In general, there are few rules that say what recruitment source is best for a given job vacancy. It is wise for employers to monitor the quality of all their recruitment sources. One way to do this is to develop and compare yield ratios for each source. This ratio expresses the percentage of applicants who successfully move from one stage of the recruitment and selection process to the next.
2. Another measure of recruitment is the cost per hire.
Recruiter Traits and Behaviors
1. The recruiter affects the nature of both the job vacancy and the applicants generated. Many applicants approach the recruiter with some skepticism and sometimes discount what the recruiter has to say. The recruiter’s characteristics and behaviors seem to have limited impact on applicants’ job choices.
Characteristics of the Recruiter
1. In general, applicants respond more positively to recruiters whom they perceive as warm and informative. The impact of other characteristics of recruiters including their age, sex, and race, is complex and inconsistent.
Behavior of the Recruiter
1. Many studies have looked at how well realistic job previews – background information about jobs’ positive and negative qualities – can help organizations minimize turnover among new employees.
2. For affecting whether people choose to take a job, the recruiter seems less important than an organization’s personnel policies that directly affect the job’s features.
Enhancing the Recruiter’s Impact
1. Although recruiters may have little influence on job choice, this does not mean recruiters cannot have an impact. Researchers have tried to find conditions in which recruiters do make a difference. Based on this research, an organization can take several steps to increase the impact that recruiters have on the people they recruit such as:
a. Can provide timely feedback
b. Can avoid behaving in ways that convey the wrong impressions about the organization
c. Can recruit with teams rather than individual recruiters