Which of the following is not an external recruiting source

REFERENCE: Lussier, R. N., & Hendon, J. R. (2019). Human resource management functions, applications, and skill development. Los Angeles: SAGE.

The Recruiting Process

The total costs associated with recruiting, selecting, and training new employees often add up to as much as 300% to 400% of their annual salary according to a new series of estimates.1, 2, 3 Recruiting is important for many businesses,4 but for Amazon in 2015, they were hiring at a rate of almost 40,000 people per quarter. And this doesn’t even count seasonal workers they expected to hire for the Christmas holiday season—about another 100,000 people.”5

LO 5-1

Identify and discuss the primary goal of the recruiting process and the major external forces acting on recruiting.

After HR managers have determined our hiring needs through the forecasting process, and after we have done job analyses (providing job descriptions and job specifications), we begin the talent acquisition process: we will need to recruit the correct numbers and types of people to fill our job openings, and then select from the recruit pool. So the actual first step in matching employees to jobs is recruiting. We can’t select and hire good employees without effectively recruiting them.6

But what are we attempting to do when we begin recruiting? We are either trying to get people inside the company to apply for different job openings, or we are trying to get outsiders to join the company. In this section, you will learn about the recruiting process.

So what is the main goal of recruiting? Do we want to reach a huge pool of potential applicants on the Internet who want to join the organization, or do we want to find just a couple of skilled people who can do the job—in other words, discriminate in detail among reasonably qualified applicants? Well, it varies. If you think about it for just a minute, you will see that if you find too many applicants, it costs the organization too much to go through the selection process. On the other hand, if you find too few, there is no selection process, and you don’t have the option to find the individual who best fits in the position and the organization.

Typically, a good rule of thumb might be to find about 15 to 25 people who want to be a part of the organization for each opening. That’s just a rule of thumb, but it is probably going to allow us a reasonable applicant pool. You can then cut that applicant pool to four or five pretty quickly, and that is a reasonable number of people from whom to choose your next employee. You certainly don’t want a massive number of recruits because it is too time-consuming and it costs the company too much to cull that number to a usable pool. However, you may get more or fewer applicants than you want if you don’t target your recruiting correctly.

Recruiting The process of creating a reasonable pool of qualified candidates for a job opening

Defining the Process

Recruiting is the process of creating a reasonable pool of qualified candidates for a job opening. Notice that this definition identifies the fact that we need qualified applicants.7 In a recent study, 84% of HR professional reported candidates having “applied skill deficits (such as problem-solving skills)” and 68% were having difficulty in filling jobs.8 Recruiting does us no good if the candidates whom we attract are not qualified to do the work. One of the most critical things that you have to do in the recruiting process is to determine very early on whether the individuals who are recruited are qualified. Thus, a good job analysis, including an up-to-date job description and specification, is helpful to the company and to the people looking for jobs because it helps everyone involved to know whether a given candidate is a match for a given job opening.

To fill an opening, potential job candidates must generally be made aware that the organization is seeking employees. They must then be persuaded to apply for the jobs. In HR recruiting, we want to use a series of tools to show the candidates why they might want to become a part of the organization. We will discuss these tools as we go through the remainder of this chapter.

External Forces Acting on Recruiting Efforts

First, though, we want to identify the forces that affect our ability to successfully recruit new employees. A series of external forces affect our ability to recruit individuals into our organization at a particular point in time.9 One factor is the general shape of national and world economies. During the 2008–2009 recession, 63% of HR executives said recruiting was cut back in their organizations.10 In 2009, 48% of HR executives also had to manage layoffs; but by 2017, many if not most employers were becoming significantly concerned with “employee retention” and requirements for new hires.11Also, legal and regulatory changes such as the Affordable Care Act have had at least some effect on the hiring of part-time and temporary workers instead of full-time employees.12 As noted in Chapter 4, the proportion of contingent workers such as consultants and independent contractors has increased from around 7% in 2013 to approximately 25% in early 2017. Among the firms shifting away from full-time employment in 2013, 38% said the shift had occurred, in part, due to implementation of the Affordable Care Act.13

SHRM

I:2

External Influences on Staffing: Labor Markets, Unions, Economic Conditions, Technology

Think about what is happening around you right now. Is the unemployment rate high or low? Are there government incentives to increase hiring of the unemployed, or is government doing very little to increase employment? Is the available supply of people with advanced skills very large, or are there not enough people with high-level skill sets available to companies? All of these things affect your ability to recruit new workers into your company.

Generally, the external forces acting on recruiting fall into two large categories: the available labor market and the social and legal environment. Let’s take a quick look at each.

The Labor Market

The availability of talent to fill our needs depends on several items in the labor market.14 The labor market is the external pool of candidates from which we draw our recruits.

Supply and demand and the unemployment rate

First, we must consider the supply and demand factors in a particular category of jobs. If we are in need of a mechanical engineer, how many mechanical engineers are available in the labor environment? Are there too many for the available number of jobs, or are there more jobs than engineers? If there is a large pool of engineers desiring a job in their field, then our job of recruiting one will be significantly easier than if there are very few available and lots of job openings.

This issue of supply and demand usually ties in directly with the unemployment rate in an area.15 Every business recruits primarily from an identifiable geographic area. Some will recruit locally (perhaps within a metropolitan area or a single city). Others will recruit regionally or nationally, while still others may recruit internationally. We need to identify our recruiting area and then determine what the unemployment rate is in that area. If unemployment is high, the job of recruiting is generally easier than if unemployment is very low. However, even when the unemployment rate in the United States was around 10% in 2010 and 2011 and there were thousands of people looking for jobs, there was still a shortage of qualified candidates for some highly skilled jobs.16

Labor market The external pool of candidates from which we draw our recruits

Generational factors in the labor force

Generational changes are creating new challenges for recruiting professionals. The millennial generation is now the largest group in the US workforce along with the workforce in most EU nations. However, most companies will have at least four distinct generations in their workforce at the same time: baby boomers (1946-1964); Gen X or the baby busters (1965-1979); Gen Y or the Millennials (1980-1994); and just the beginning of Gen Z or the iGeneration (1995- ).17,18 Each generation has different ways of working. Millennials tend to work better when working in a collaborative environment while the newest Gen Z workers want their own space and their own goals.19 In order for recruiters to be successful, they will need to approach individuals from these different generations in different ways. (See the Trends and Issues section for more detail on attracting the Millennial and Gen Z labor force.)

Competitors

We also have to consider our competitors and how much they contend with us for the available talent in a particular field. If competition is very strong for available technical talent such as mechanical engineers—for instance, if there are a significant number of competitors and each competitor needs a large number of engineers—then it will be a more difficult recruiting environment.20 Similarly, if there aren’t many competitors who need a particular type of mechanical engineer and are working to attract such applicants to their business, then the recruiting environment will likely be much less difficult. So our recruiting environment depends on the labor market and on our competitors.

Work Application 5-1

Select one of your jobs and discuss the supply and demand issues (the unemployment rate and competition between employers) that had an effect on your job search.

Social and Legal Environment

The social environment in the country in which we are operating also affects our ability to recruit new people into our organizations.21 Today, people put more weight on “me time,” job satisfaction, and the ability to move up in the organization than they did in past years. As a result, workers look at the social environment in the organization to make decisions concerning whether or not to apply for a job there. In many cases, new employees also expect a high level of benefits and good opportunities for training and development.22 As a result, the social environment drives our ability to recruit our 21st century workforce.

We also have to take into account the various laws that limit the ways in which we can recruit. First and most obviously, we have to abide by all of the EEO laws that we discussed in Chapter 3, and we must avoid any issues of discrimination in our recruiting efforts. So, this is another area in which we could apply the OUCH test to ensure fairness and equity in our processes. There are also laws in some situations that limit our ability to lure employees away from competitor firms. These antipoaching and “wage-fixing” laws significantly limit ability to attract talent from competitor companies in some industries.23 In other cases, labor agreements may limit our ability to recruit, or the union itself may be able to place limits on our ability to recruit from outside of the union’s ranks. We may also choose to recruit more part-timers due to the costs involved with the Affordable Care Act. In addition, noncompete agreements might not allow us to recruit certain individuals who are bound by such agreements. State laws might also apply to recruiting in certain industries or to recruiting certain types of employees. HR managers must therefore be well versed in the various laws, agreements, and regulations that in any way limit their ability to recruit.

LO 5-2

Briefly discuss the main items we need to consider before recruiting.

Organizational Recruiting Considerations

Once we become aware of the limitations that are placed on us by the labor market and the legal environment, we can start to consider the internal issues that control our recruiting processes. When should we go through the recruiting process, what alternatives do we have to recruiting (outsourcing, retraining, etc.), and should we recruit our applicants from internal sources (within the company) or external sources? We have to set policies on these topics in order to maintain consistency, and we need consistency in order to be fair and equitable and so that we can defend our processes if it becomes necessary. So, what do we have to think about, and in what level of detail?

What Policies to Set

We have to think about a lot of things as we work to allay a shortage of people within the company. We need to determine how we are going to go through the recruiting process before we start trying to recruit new members into our workforce. Among other things, we have to answer the following questions:

· Under what conditions will we recruit new people into the company?

· What alternatives do we have, and when will we use them?

· Should we recruit locally, regionally, nationally, or globally?

· How should we incorporate technology in recruiting efforts?

· Are we going to recruit from within our own ranks first, or go outside the organization?

· What primary recruiting sources will provide us with the best recruits for our company?

We have to make these determinations based on our particular company circumstances, taking into account all of the information from our forecasting processes. Let’s discuss four of the primary items we will need to think about before the recruiting process starts.

Work Application 5-2

Select a future job (preferably after graduation) and describe your social expectations when job searching. What type of organization do you want to work for? Also, will there be any legal restrictions on your job search?

When to Recruit

The answer seems obvious: We recruit when we need someone to fill a job. But it’s not that simple. We don’t necessarily have to recruit someone when we need a job filled. Remember what we said in Chapter 4. There are all kinds of ways to mitigate a worker shortage in the organization, and the option we choose depends on a bunch of different factors. Should we recruit or bring in temps or other contingent workers? Should we add overtime or outsource some tasks? We need to identify the points at which we would generally go through the process of starting and carrying out a recruitment campaign, because the campaign itself is expensive. We don’t want to go through a long recruiting process and then figure out that we didn’t need to—if we did, we would just be wasting money.24

Alternatives to Recruitment

Do we have a viable and financially feasible way to solve our shortage other than through recruitment? Is the alternative less expensive or better for our circumstances in some other way? We don’t want to recruit new employees into the organization if working a group of people overtime for a week or two, or even a month or two, will solve our problem. We may be prohibited from recruiting because of an attrition policy or a hiring freeze. We might be able to solve our problem with temporary employees instead of new full-time workers.

We have to weigh all of the available options, and we should generally have a policy that tells us when we would use each option. We need to know what the primary objectives of the organization are so that we can analyze the possibility of outsourcing (we don’t want to outsource a critical task).25We also need to know how much overtime is currently being used so that we can know whether we are working our current employees to the point where their job satisfaction is likely to start going down.26

Before deciding to recruit new full-time employees, managers might consider giving current employees overtime or hiring contingent workers.

©iStockphoto.com/vgajic

What kind of labor market does our industry and company face right now? If we are in a market where there are many people out of work, we may be able to get a much better new hire right now, so it might be best to recruit for new employees. Conversely, if we are in a tight labor market, we might waste a lot of resources trying to recruit new employees because we might end up getting no good candidates. We need to analyze each of the options for mitigating a labor shortage other than making new hires, and we need to create a policy concerning when each of these options is useful in our organization. We have to take all factors that we know into account in making our recruiting decision.

Reach of the Recruiting Effort

We also need to identify our effective labor market. Do we plan to recruit only from local sources? Should we consider people all over a particular region (e.g., the mid-South or New England)? Do we need to recruit globally or even internationally?27 Again, the answer is, “It depends.”

What factors are involved with our decision? The first factor is simple: Can we find the right number and types of employees if we recruit locally? If so, then we may be able to work only in our local labor market. If not, we may be forced to recruit from a broader pool of talent. Secondly, can we get better talent to apply if we recruit regionally, nationally, or globally?28 Additionally, do we need this type of talent in order to accomplish our organizational goals? (Remember, if we are a low-cost producer, we may not want top-notch talent in all areas of our company.) Is the job that we are recruiting for so specialized that we need to recruit from all over the world? Do we want to recruit from locations far away from our organization if we don’t have to? Of course not. It is time-consuming and expensive to bring people to the organization from far away. So we expand our geographic recruiting area only when we need to. However, remember that multinational corporations tend to hire locally, but many of their total number of employees are from other countries.

Social Media and the Technology Recruiting Revolution

More and more, companies are targeting recruiting efforts to very specific candidates with exacting requirements. The only way we have good reach into the appropriate labor market in such cases is by using technology and specific online platforms to look for the few candidates who match our needs.

Many firms are heavily using social media sites, including LinkedIn and Facebook, to assist with their recruiting efforts. These social media sites can provide recruiters with much more ability to reach specific individuals with detailed skill sets than they had in the past.29 However, this reach may bring with it some significant issues for the business—such as having to pore over hundreds or even thousands of résumés in response to a job opening, or being taken to court over what someone sees as a written promise that a job will have certain characteristics. Wagner v. Home Depot is an example of a case in which the plaintiff sued the organization for false promises of stable long-term employment.30 So how do you get the value of social media without exacerbating the problems that it can cause? You have to understand social media’s reach and use it selectively, whether you’re a job seeker or a recruiter.31

In a recruiting situation, social media provides the company with a number of valuable services. As mentioned, it provides a reach that the company may not get with other means such as advertising in local newspapers or on radio or television. For example, in May 2017, Facebook had more than 1.9 billion monthly active users (nearly 2 of every 7 people on earth!), meaning it gives recruiters a huge reach into the global labor market.32 And especially in higher-level job recruiting, where there will be few individuals with the necessary skills, social media job sites like Indeed (200 million unique visitors per month in 2017), Jobvite, Monster.com, and now Google Jobs, can get our message out to a much larger group of potential candidates across the country or even around the world.33 The online research and networking opportunities provided by such sites give the recruiter information on job candidates, in many cases before they are even directly contacted.

Social media sites like can also provide the candidate with information on our company values and culture, which is critical information in attracting Millennials and Gen Zers.34 Corporate profile information, also known as corporate branding, can help individuals make a better decision concerning whether or not they would be comfortable in our organization, which in turn lowers the possibility that they will take the job and then cost us extra money because they end up leaving within a few weeks or months. And even though Facebook is primarily a personal networking site, company recruiters can use software programs like Monster.com’s BeKnown that provide them with the ability to directly target and recruit new employees on Facebook.35

Recruiters are also beginning to heavily use Artificial Intelligence (AI) and other smart technology recruiting tools in their jobs. Chatbots to follow up with active candidates, schedulers for setting appointments, search programs that look for and query passive candidates about interest in open positions, and other tools now take care of many routine tasks for the recruiter. Programs like Mya from Firstjob,36 Olivia by Recruiting.ai,37 and RAI from HiringSolved,38 will continue to take over many of the common tasks in recruiter interactions with candidates and applicants.

Work Application 5-3

Select a future job (preferably after graduation) and state the geographic area in which you will apply for jobs.

One of the major selling points besides the fact that these programs save significant amounts of recruiter time is that AI can make better decisions than human recruiters because of the lack of bias.39 However, most of the companies selling this software also note that AI programs are only as good as their programming.40 Companies will need to be aware of the danger of disparate impact due to biased inputs into the systems. Validity, especially, will need to be continually analyzed to insure that we are not inadvertently harming protected groups because of utilizing skewed inputs. Recall that in Chapter 4 we discussed the fact that Googlers are known to be dog lovers, and that an early attempt to identify candidates for employment there used this fact to determine who would fit with the company. However, that fact would not have validity, so the question was ultimately deleted. Claims for AI are that they reduce bias, but that is not necessarily so. Computers certainly get rid of emotional responses to candidates, but if biased inputs are used to configure the AI, bias will also result in the system’s outcomes. Keeping the OUCH Test in mind—especially the four-fifths rule to measure for Consistency in Effect—will allow companies to monitor validity and reliability of these systems

So are there other problems with technology-based and social media recruiting? Yes, and some of them are significant dangers to the company. For instance, there is the potential for discrimination through disparate treatment of individuals because of information posted on their Facebook or LinkedIn sites or on their Twitter feed.41 A Carnegie Mellon University study found that candidates who identified themselves as Muslim on their Facebook profiles “were less likely to be called for interviews than [were] Christian applicants.”42 Pictures can also potentially identify individuals as members of a protected class, and those pictures may cause subconscious bias on the part of some recruiters. Any bias, whether intentional or unintentional, is a danger to the organization during the recruiting and hiring process.

Finally, because we are more narrowly targeting searches than has historically been the case, there is also the potential for “gold-plating,” or creating massive and complex requirements in a job specification. Ironically, one example comes from the CEO of LinkedIn, Jeff Weiner. He noted that when his company first identified the need for a data center manager, its initial (large) list of criteria for acceptable candidates was analyzed and the company “found only seven identifiable people on Earth who met all of the conditions.”43 Once management relaxed the requirements by getting rid of some that were really not required, they quickly found 126 potential candidates. There is some evidence that this process of creating a massive catalog of qualifications that a firm would like to have but that is really not necessary is one reason companies believe they are experiencing a shortage of “qualified” employees. So we have to be careful to identify only necessary information and candidate characteristics when recruiting via social media to avoid unnecessary problems.

Internal or External Recruiting?

What is our policy going to be concerning recruitment from our current pool of employees? We can very rarely just say that we will “promote from within” and stick to that policy. So we have to create policies concerning when and how we will recruit from our current employee pool and when we will go outside the organization. Why? Probably the biggest reason is so that our employees perceive fairness in our recruiting policies.44

LO 5-3

Discuss the major advantages and disadvantages of both internal and external recruiting.

If we say we will recruit from within and then go outside the organization to recruit a new manager, many of our employees will begin to think that we were “just talking” when we said we would promote internally; and they might begin to show less loyalty to the organization because they feel that the organization failed to show them loyalty. However, if our policies say that we will go outside for recruits when it is unlikely that anyone in the organization would have the skill set necessary to do the job identified in our job specification, then we can provide a legitimate answer to someone who questions our recruiting process.

Work Application 5-4

Select an organization you work or have worked for and give an example of either an open, targeted, or closed recruiting method it uses. List the job(s) that method was used to recruit for.

Additionally, we might have a policy that says that when we are instituting new processes or when we have identified significant resistance to change as an issue in a section of the organization, we will bring in new people with new ideas and different skills. We may also identify specific occupations in our organization that will typically be recruited from outside, usually due to the need for a specialized skill set (e.g., nuclear plant operator, corporate attorney, emergency medical technician). It is unlikely that we would promote from within to these types of positions.

These are just some of the things that we need to consider as we create our recruiting policies. Now, let’s take a closer look at internal versus external recruiting efforts and the advantages and disadvantages of each approach.

Internal Recruiting

Internal recruiting involves filling job openings with current employees or people the employees know. Here we will discuss internal recruitingsources, promotability ratings and managerial sponsorship, and the advantages and disadvantages of internal recruiting.

Internal Recruiting Sources

There are two common types of internal recruiting:

· Promotions from within. Many organizations post job openings on physical or electronic bulletin boards, in company newsletters, and so on. Current employees may apply or bid for the open positions. Hilton Worldwide is one company that works hard to promote its internal hiring practices.45 Moves today are frequently lateral rather than in the form of promotions.

· Employee referrals. Employees may be encouraged to refer friends and relatives for positions. Jobvite notes that about 40% of its client-company new hires are from existing employee referrals.46 For hard-to-recruit-for jobs, some firms pay a bonus to employees when their referred applicant is hired.47

Open, Targeted, or Closed Recruiting?

When it comes to promotion from within as an internal recruiting method, the organization has several options. We can use open, targeted, or closed recruiting methods.48 Open recruiting consists of advertising the job openly within the organization, and anyone who meets the qualifications can apply for the job opening.

Internal recruiting Filling job openings with current employees or people the employees know

Targeted recruiting is pretty much what it sounds like. We do not openly advertise the position internally. Instead, we ask managers to privately nominate workers who they feel would be able to do the job that needs to be filled. HR will then evaluate the candidates put forward by the managers and then forward the list of the best candidates to the hiring manager. We have to be more careful with targeted recruiting because it can allow or appear to allow bias in the recruiting and selection process.

SHRM

I:4

Internal Recruitment: Timing, Open/Closed/Targeted Recruitment, Bona Fide Seniority Systems

Finally, closed recruiting occurs when hiring managers have a need to fill a position and they communicate that need to HR. HR recruiters will then search the organization’s files for people who have the requisite skills and qualifications and send a list of such individuals to the hiring manager. The hiring manager can then select from the applicants identified by the HR department.

One of the difficult issues the organization may run into if it chooses an internal recruiting option is the presence of a bona fide seniority system, meaning a system that gives preference to individuals with longer tenure in the organization.49 If we have such a system, we may have to allow people with more seniority to apply for any internal job openings, which would limit our ability to use targeted or closed recruiting.

SHRM

I:5

Internal Recruitment: Promotability Ratings, Managerial Sponsorship, Self/Peer Assessments, Panels/Review Boards

Promotability Ratings and Managerial Sponsorship

We can do some things within the organization to make the internal recruiting process go a bit smoother in most cases. As part of our annual appraisal process, we can include a “promotability rating” for each member of the organization.50 This rating evaluates the individual for fitness for higher-level jobs in the organization. If we do it as part of our normal appraisal process, it adds very little to the workload of the managers in the company.

We may use some other tools to assess promotability in our efforts to find the best qualified individuals within the organization. We can have each of our employees complete a self-assessment, and we can also ask peers to assess their coworkers for promotability. We can also have people who desire to be considered for promotion put themselves before an organizational review board that will judge their qualifications and readiness for such promotion opportunities. Each of these options strengthens the ability of the organization to get the best possible candidates for internal promotion opportunities.

We can also request managerial sponsorship for a person to be considered for job opportunities through internal recruiting. In this case, we would ask managers to provide their sponsorship for an individual before that person would be considered for a promotion through the internal recruiting process. This sponsorship information would then be used in our internal recruiting efforts. This is a type of mentoring.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Internal Recruiting

Is it generally a good idea to recruit from inside the organization? What are the major advantages and disadvantages of internal recruiting?

5-1 Applying the Concept 5-1

Internal Recruiting

Review the following list of recruitment methods, and then write the letter corresponding to each recruitment method before the situation(s) in which it was used.

1. open

2. targeted

3. closed

· ____ 1. My supervisor got promoted to middle management and selected me to be his replacement.

· ____ 2. My company has a policy of posting all job openings, and we can apply for better jobs that we want.

· ____ 3. I got the job as supervisor in the other department because the VP of production recommended me for the position.

· ____ 4. My company stopped placing want ads in the newspaper, and it posts openings only online.

· ____ 5. I got the entry-level job because the HR representative sent me for an interview with the hiring manager.

Advantages include the following:

· Possible increases in organizational commitment and job satisfaction based on the opportunity to advance in the organization with commensurate increases in pay.

· The internal recruit will be able to learn more about the “big picture” in the company and become more valuable.

· The individual also has shown at least some interest in the organization, has knowledge of our operations and processes, and feels comfortable continuing employment within the company.

· The company has existing knowledge of the applicant and a record of that person’s previous work.

· The organization can save money by recruiting internally, because of both lower