Recruitment refers to the overall process of attracting, selecting and appointing suitable candidates for jobs within an organization, either permanent or temporary. It can also refer to processes involved in choosing individuals for unpaid positions, such as voluntary roles or training programs.
Recruiting may be undertaken in-house by managers, human resource generalists, and/or recruitment specialists. Alternatively, parts of the process may be undertaken by either public-sector employment agencies, commercial recruitment agencies, or specialist search consultancies. The use of internet-based services and computer technologies to support all aspects of activity and processes has become widespread.
Approaches
There are a variety of approaches and most organizations will utilize a combination of two or more of these as part of a recruitment exercise or to deliver their overall strategy. There are six common models:
- In-house or human resources personnel may in some case still conduct all stages of the recruitment process. In smaller organizations, it may be done by individual managers. More frequently, whilst managing the overall recruitment exercise and the decision-making at the final stages of the selection process, external service providers may undertake the more specialized aspects of the process.
- Social Media is a new trend which can implement in the current recruitment process. Social media helps to drive passive candidates and indirectly helps to create brand awareness about the company. A few tools commonly used by social media recruiters are LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc.
- Outsourcing of recruitment to an external provider may be the solution for some small businesses and at times for large organizations.
- Employment agencies are established as both publicly funded services and as commercial private sector operations. Services may support permanent, temporary, or casual worker. They may be generic agencies that deal with providing unskilled workers through to highly skilled managerial or technical staff or so-called niche agencies that specialize in a particular industrial sector or professional group.
- Executive search firms recruit for executive and professional positions. These firms operate across a range of models such as contingency or retained approaches, and also hybrid models where advertising is also used to ensure a flow of candidates alongside relying on networking as their main source of candidates.
- Internet recruitment services include recruitment websites and job search engines used to gather as many candidates as possible by advertising a position over a wide geographic area. In addition, social network sourced recruitment has emerged as a major method of sourcing candidates.
