Effective Recruitment and Selection
Before you read this article, try your hand at the first activity. Though all of us have our own sets of experiences and opinions, we must not place our organizations in a situation of liability due to our individual biases, as they may not be strategically aligned with the organization's best interests. You must learn to work through personal perceptions and make strategic business decisions when recruiting and selecting human capital.
Person–Job, Person–Organization Fit?
A Two-Way Process
It is important for both the job applicant and the organization to ensure that the right job goes to the right person. Taking the wrong job may be just as disastrous for the employee as for the organization. Recruitment and selection, therefore, involves the organization (represented by the manager) and the applicant trying to discover the extent to which their separate interests are likely to be served by the appointment. In other words, it is a two-way process. Applicants should have a realistic picture of the job so that they can decide if they really want it and whether they could do it well. They should also be given the opportunity to consider what type of organization they may be joining and whether it would suit them. There are two different approaches to assessing suitability for a particular job: person-job fit and person-organization fit. They are based on different assumptions about people and what determines their behavior at work.
Person–Job Fit
The traditional approach to recruitment and selection is based on the view that organizations should specify the requirements of the job as closely as possible and then look for individuals whose personal attributes fit those requirements. It is based on the assumption that human behavior is determined by factors particular to the individual, and the clear implication is that selection techniques should be concerned with accessing and measuring these personal factors, which can then be compared with those required for the job.
The person-job fit approach has been criticized for a variety of reasons. In particular, the amount and pace of change in organizations mean that the jobs for which people are recruited often change. Consequently, organizations may be interested in potential beyond the immediate job, and people have the capacity to influence the organization's performance beyond the boundaries of their own jobs. Increasingly, it is seen as important to ensure that there is also a fit between the applicant and the organization.
Person–Organization Fit
This approach stresses that people's behavior and performance are strongly influenced by the environment in which they find themselves. So being successful in a job in one organization does not necessarily imply success in a similar job in another. In assessing the suitability of a job applicant a manager should explore the reasons why a person has performed well in their existing job and consider whether similar conditions apply in the new job. Advocates of the person-organization fit approach stress that an important consideration in recruitment is how suited the applicant is to the organization – its style, approach, pace of change, and informal ways of working.
In other words, you need to think beyond whether someone simply has the technical skills to perform in the job and assess their fit with the culture of the organization. However, this carries the danger of excluding suitably qualified candidates because their "face does not fit". This approach suggests a greater need to describe the context of the job to applicants, including the difficulties and pressures associated with it. In general, "overselling" a job can result in individuals leaving after a short time and hence the costs of a repeat recruitment and selection process and further managerial time.