After the shortlist creates, a selection interview will be arranged for the final candidates. Selection interview is most important in the recruitment process of Sifang because it can give an insight into the candidates’ ability. It also allows the company to judge the candidate’s motive, personality and behavior, evaluate the relevance of their qualifications and experience, and provide the candidates with further information about the organisation and the job role involved. As a rule, managers of HR department and the candidate’s future managers will attend as interviewers.
In the next program, for a healthy factor, a physical examination will be given to the candidates who pass selection interview. After that, candidates will experience a three month probation time with training. In the period, their factual ability will be examined. The candidates’ department manager will transfer the feedback to the HR department. In the end, if the HR department feel satisfied with the candidates, agreements will be signed between them.
3. The appraisal of Sifang’s recruitment process
3.1 Advantages
Firstly, after the recruitment is implemented, basic information will be entered by job applicants such as home addresses, ID numbers and so on. When an applicant is selected and hired, the above information will already be in the company system. This will allow new employees to get email accounts and access other services more quickly. In addition, managers will have much more data available for reporting and workforce planning.
Secondly, another advantage of Sifang’s recruitment is the three months probation time which provides the company a viable, effective chance to reassess candidates.
Last but not the least, face-to-face interview allows a certain assessment to be made that can not be established in any other way (Torrington and Hall, 1995). Interview creates a public relation between both parts. It gives the candidates the opportunity to ask the interviewers any questions, such as information about the working hours and contract negotiation. On the other hand, it allows recruiters to answer the candidates’ questions, and increase the perceived attractiveness of the job.
3.2 Disadvantages
The recruitment process can be very costly. It takes a great deal of time to set up an effective recruitment process. Therefore, there is considerable scope along the way for waste and inefficiency. And then, the major negative issues concerning the part of interview are related to its unreliability, invalidity and subjectivity (Torrington and Hall, 1995). Some perceptual errors may be made in the interview, which include stereotyping, halo effect, discrimination and so forth (Barclay, 1999).
A candidate may feel discriminated against because of his/her disability in the part of physical examination. In addition, the company may neglect a better channel to recruits staff which is a job agency. Job agency is experienced in providing certain types of staffs and they may already have an existing bank of potential employees which can then be matched to specific requirements of a client.
3.3 Timescales and Success ratio
Sifang’s recruitment of the length of time is fairly flexible from the three months minimum period to the 15 months maximum. From the previous experience, Sifang usually prepares three months necessary to advertise and fill a vacancy if no difficulties were encountered because there was nothing specific to contribute the timescale being longer. There are three stages of the recruitment process that influenced the timescales: creating and defining the position, advertising, and security checks.
Recruitment success ratio in Sifang is very high because of the excellent HR department. The main reason is that the Sifang’s recruitment advertisements only appear on the power system automatic protection field. The advertisements try to attract candidates who work in this field and fit the company’s person specification. Another important reason is the HR department have a carefully selection process such as shortlist, interview, and probation which can reduce the failure rate.
4. The culture and management style of Sifang
4.1 Company Organisational Culture
Organisational culture is a system of knowledge and standards for believing, evaluating and understanding etc that serve to environmental backgrounds (Allaire and Firsirotu 1984), which will help with the decision making and determine how the business is run. The organisation’s culture is very much concerned with the way in which people in the organisation interact with each other, and the typical patterns of interactions that have developed over time.
Sifang’s organisational culture focuses on honesty, responsibility and professional skills. Meanwhile, Sifang provides a broad stage for personal development. They always keeps in mind that qualified employees, endless self-challenging and management renovation construct the only bridge to success for a high- tech enterprise.
From the above description it can be seen that the main organisational culture in Sifang is task culture. Task culture focuses on full fulfilling the needs of the organisation and its problems by working in groups. Expertise creativity and flexibility is therefore important. This culture encourages the staffs to take more responsibility and power. Teams will have input when determining how a job will be done and their views and opinions will be listened to.
4.2 Management styles
For managers to be effective, they need to develop a style of management which suits the culture of the organisation. There are many different styles of management and four main styles are recognised as being effective if used at the right time and under the right conditions which are autocratic management, consultative management, democratic management, and laissez-faire management.
The management style is mainly used in Sifang is consultative. The managers of the company tend to seek other employees within the company for advice before making decisions. This type of managers tends to aim to draw on more sources of opinion than just him/herself. The consultative managers will have good listening and also the capability to create the right communication channels to allow him/her to consult with other employees easily. For instance, as part of the consultative management style, Sifang uses suggestion boxes, which makes it easier for employees with new ideas to express their ideas without feeling intimidated. Managers also established an award to encourage staffs who have better suggestions and ideas. These methods bring many advantages to the company.
On the other hand, sometimes the Sifang’s head office takes the autocratic management style. It trend to give instructions to set the objectives and targets to staffs rather than asking them for their opinions in some situations. The company takes external recruitment because the top managers believe that the company hardly recruit candidates inside business because it will cause another vacancy will be created which might have to be filled. In the case, the head office/manager is the only one contributing to the decision-making process.
5. Impacts of the organisational culture and management style on the recruitment process
The recruitment process is a part of the total organisational strategy plan for business growth. The managers of Sifang believe that market competition ultimately is enterprise talent competition. Therefore, they have attached most importance to recruit talent from its founding. Sifang’s organisational culture can impact the process by taking prudent steps. The company only advertises its recruitment on the power system automatic protection field because the culture focuses on professional skills. The honesty, responsibility features can build a good reputation to candidates to make an earlier contribution to the hiring organisation. Overall, the recruitment process in Sifang has become a model of the values and methods to develop the organisation to run in an optimally human way.
The recruitment of staff is a mixture of both consultative and autocratic management styles in Sifang. On the one hand, through consultative management, managers can always understand what the company’s need on the recruitment. On the other hand, the head office autocratically set how much can be spent on the staffs. In the process, the final decisions are only made by managers under the autocratic management. When candidates are in the probation, the HR department only considers the feedback which comes from their managers and ignores the opinions of the candidate’s colleagues.
Compare with the other company’s recruitment in the same industry, Dongfang Electronics Information Industry Group Co., Ltd (Dongfang), which is a competitor of Sifang. There are some differences because of the different management styles. Sifang has never recruit staffs from internal environment because of the autocratic management style. On the contrary, Dongfang has approached democratic management style and the company takes a mixture of both internal and external recruitment after group discussion.
6. Conclusion
The report described and appraise the recruitment process of Beijing Sifang Automation Co., Ltd (Sifang) through analysisd its strengths, weakness, timescales, and success ratio. The company’s culture, management style and how these impact in the recruitment process have also be introduced.
As I come to a conclusion, I may reiterate the importance of a recruitment process to a business. Without it, corporations and organisations will run the risk of having unskilled employees and having a low profit margin. To hire people effectively, the HR department must think about the company needs over a longer period rather than simply getting next weeks job done. And also, the company’s organisational culture and management styles can impact the recruitment process in both positive and negative way.
6. References
Barber, A.E. (1998) Recruiting employees: Individual and Organizational Perspectives. Thousand Oaks, Sage Publications
Barclay, J. (1999) Employee Selection: A question of Structure,
Beardwell, L. & Holden, L. (2001) Human Resource management: a contemporary approach. Third Edition, London, FT Prentice Hill
Brown, A. (1995) Organisational Culture. London, Pitman Publishing.
Price, A. (1996) Human Resource Management in a Business Context. Second Edition London, Thomson Learning.
Torrington, D. & Hall, L. (1998) Human Resource Management. Fourth Edition, Hertfordshire, Prentice Hall Europe