Rethinking The Recruitment Process: Time For Change

Recruitment is a critical part of effective human resource management as it has become increasingly clear that it directly impacts the bottom line of any company. Recruitment is a set of activities conducted by an organization to find a suitable employee with the implicit goal of improving organizational performance. Thus, it is important to evaluate recruitment process from an organizational perspective considering organizations as the actors, and bring proper remedies to improvise the process. The potential significance of recruitment for both individuals and organizations makes it an interesting topic for research. Several studies in the past have examined recruitment from an individual’s point of view. There has been limited research on studying recruitment as an organizational phenomenon. Hence, quite often these studies ignore some of the subtle yet very important issues in the recruitment process. To get a comprehensive understanding of the recruitment process, micro and macro research studies should complement each other. This study aims at understanding these subtle issues and the impact they can have on any organization in the long run. The study has been done keeping in mind that a prospective employee of a company is also its potential customers. The results are based on focus group interview with 30 IT professionals and web survey sent out to over 2550 IT professionals in India. The study revealed that many IT professionals are not satisfied with the way in which companies currently handle interview procedures. The recruitment process in companies ignores certain very important aspects which might have a serious implication on the organization in terms of its brand image, the talent pool, employee satisfaction and HR policies. These subtle and often ignored issues can be managed with little resources and efforts, and the benefits thus achieved can be huge in long term. Carefully designing the recruitment experience and executing it would need discipline, commitment and a support from top management in the organization. Only this way would the true benefits of strategic HRM practices would become clear to organizations.