WEEK FOUR LESSON Recruitment and Selection

1 1 | BA 203 H R M W E E K T H R E E ( 3 ) L E C T U R E N O T E S week four LESSON Recruitment and Selection Employer Branding The processes of Recruitment and e- Recruitment Selection Methods: reliability and validity Designing Selection processes, including the role of e- Selection methods 2 | BA 203 H R M W E E K T H R E E ( 3 ) L E C T U R E N O T E S Employer Branding The term "employer brand" was first publicly introduced to a management audience in 1990, and defined by Simon Barrow, chairman of People in Business, and Tim Ambler, Senior Fellow of London Business School, in the Journal of Brand Management in December 1996. This academic paper was the first published attempt to "test the application of brand management techniques to human resource management".

2 Within this paper, Simon Barrow and Tim Ambler defined the employer brand as "the package of functional, economic and psychological benefits provided by employment, and identified with the employing company". Employer brand denotes an organisation's reputation as an employer. The term was first used in the early 1990s, and has since become widely adopted by the global management community. Minchington (2005) defines employer brand as "the image of your organisation as a 'great place to work'". Employer Branding While the term "employer brand" denotes what people currently associate with the organisation, employer branding has been defined as the total of the company's efforts to communicate to existing and prospective staff what makes it a desirable place to work, and the active management of "a company's image as seen through the eyes of its associates and potential hires".

3 Employer Brand Management Employer branding is concerned with enhancing the company's employer brand. Employer brand management covers the management of every aspect of the employment experience including the people management processes and practices (often referred to as "touch-points") that shape the perceptions of existing and prospective employees. In other words, employer brand management addresses the reality of the employment experience and not simply its presentation. By doing so it supports both external Recruitment of the right kind of talent sought by an organisation to achieve its goals, and the subsequent desire for effective employee engagement and employee retention. 3 | BA 203 H R M W E E K T H R E E ( 3 ) L E C T U R E N O T E S Employer Brand Proposition Just as a customer brand proposition is used to define a product or service offer, an employee value proposition is used to define an organisation's employment offer.

4 Likewise the marketing disciplines associated with branding and brand management have been increasingly applied by the human resources and talent management community to attract, engage and retain talented candidates and employees, in the same way that marketing applies such tools to attracting and retaining clients, customers and consumers. Employer brand practitioners and authors argue that effective employer branding and brand management requires a clear Employer Brand proposition, or employee Value Proposition. This serves to: define what the organisation would most like to be associated with as an employer; highlight the attributes that differentiate the organisation from other employers; and clarify the 'give and get' of the employment deal (balancing the value that employees are expected to contribute with the value from employment that they can expect in return).

5 This latter aspect of the employer brand proposition is often referred to in the HR literature as the "psychological contract". Employer Branding and Internal Marketing Internal marketing focuses on communicating the customer brand promise, and the attitudes and behaviours expected from employees to deliver on that promise. While it is clearly beneficial to the organisation for employees to understand their role in delivering the customer brand promise, the effectiveness of internal marketing activities can often be short-lived if the brand values on which the service experience is founded are not experienced by the employees in their interactions with the organisation. This is the gap that employer brand thinking and practice seeks to address with a more mutually beneficial employment deal / Psychological contract.

6 4 | BA 203 H R M W E E K T H R E E ( 3 ) L E C T U R E N O T E S Brand-led Culture Change Compared with the more typically customer centric focus of Internal marketing, internal branding / brand engagement takes a more 'inside-out', value-based approach to shaping employee perceptions and behaviours, following the lead of the highly influential 'Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies' study published in the mid-90's. This study sought to demonstrate that companies with consistent, distinctive and deeply held values tended to outperform those companies with a less clear and articulated ethos. While brand-led culture change is often the stated desire of these programmes their focus on communication-led, marketing methods (however, involving or experiential) has been prone to the same failings of conventional internal marketing.

7 As 's founder, Jeff Bezos, asserts: "One of things you find in companies is that once a culture is formed it takes nuclear weaponry to change it". You cannot simply assert your way to a new culture, no more can you assert your way to a strong brand, it needs to be consistently and continuously shaped and managed, which is one of the primary reasons many organisations have turned from the short term engagement focus of internal branding initiatives to more long term focus of employer brand management. 5 | BA 203 H R M W E E K T H R E E ( 3 ) L E C T U R E N O T E S The processes of Recruitment and e- Recruitment Recruitment Process Recruitment and Selection is the major function of the human resource department and Recruitment process is the first step towards creating the competitive strength and the strategic advantage for the organisations.

8 Recruitment process involves a systematic procedure from sourcing the candidates to arranging and conducting the interviews and requires many resources and time. There are a number of stages, which can be used to define and set out the nature of particular jobs for Recruitment purposes; 1. Identifying the vacancy: The Recruitment process begins with the human resource department receiving requisitions for Recruitment from any department of the company. These contain: Posts to be filled Number of persons Duties to be performed Qualifications required 2. Preparing the job description and person specification. 3. Advertising the Vacancy - locating and developing the sources of required number and type of employees. 4. Short-listing and identifying the prospective employee with required characteristics.

9 5. Arranging the interviews with the selected candidates. 6. Conducting the interview and decision making 6 | BA 203 H R M W E E K T H R E E ( 3 ) L E C T U R E N O T E S Internal and External Sources of Recruitment Recruiting individuals to fill particular posts within a business can be done either internally by Recruitment within the firm, or externally by recruiting people from outside. Internal Sources of Recruitment 1. TRANSFERS The employees are transferred from one department to another according to their efficiency and experience. 2. PROMOTIONS The employees are promoted from one department to another with more benefits and greater responsibility based on efficiency and experience. 3. Others are Upgrading and Demotion of present employees according to their performance.

10 4. Retired and Retrenched employees may also be recruited once again in case of shortage of qualified personnel or increase in load of work. Recruitment such people save time and costs of the organisations as the people are already aware of the organisational culture and the policies and procedures. 5. The dependents and relatives of Deceased employees and Disabled employees are also done by many companies so that the members of the family do not become dependent on the mercy of others. The advantages of internal Recruitment are that: 1. Considerable savings can be made. Individuals with inside knowledge of how a business operates will need shorter periods of training and time for 'fitting in'. 2. The organisation is unlikely to be greatly 'disrupted' by someone who is used to working with others in the organisation.