RECRUITMENT & SELECTION
Recruitment and selection is a matchmaking process, in the steps of which the right person is found for the right position. However, several pairs of dilemmas can rise during the process. The options one may make can be equally good, but awareness is important to handle outcomes of the choice.
The very first dilemma in recruitment and selection, whether it should be carried out in-house or should be outsourced. Both of them can be equally good, with different advantages and disadvantages.
Outsourcing recruitment can provide free time for other HR functions, such as HR consultancy within the firm, but external professionals may not know the needs of the company enough. While the in-house recruitment is time-consuming, with lots of administration duties, but the number of candidates is larger and organisational recruiters know the needs of the company better.
The second paradox in recruitment and selection can be seen when setting the criteria-levels for candidates. This means a company has the option to hire somebody who still needs to improve his/her skills, gain more experience in order to be productive or hire somebody who already possesses the skills and experience to excel in the given job. Both of them are appropriate, but until in the first case the company provides space for improvement and on-the-job learning possibility for the employee, thus motivating him/her and retaining her, in the second option the company can expect that the employee may leave soon, because he/she will soon be appropriate for a higher position. Another side of the coin, hiring somebody with less experience, knowledge, skills is cheaper for the company, but the company has to invest in training and developing that employee (invest not only is the sense of nominations for trainings, but also coaching/mentoring activity from the side of the supervisor). The hire a more experienced person is obviously more expensive, who can quickly add profits to the business, and can quickly be promoted or may leave the company, which is a loss, because it generates another recruitment project.
Paradox in the selection phase of the recruitment process in the use of assessment methods: recruiters usually use those assessment methods first, which are less reliable. During the phase in which the candidate pool is the most reduces. This means, that the pool of candidates is largely downsized with the help of such assessment methods, which are less reliable and less objective, than those which are used in a later phase, when anyway the pool is already smaller. This means in practice that resume pre-screening is a less reliable form of candidate assessment than psychological tests, and still the first preceeds the latter. This however, may also be, because of the cost of reliable and objective assessment methods, such as phychological test, handwriting analysis, etc.
The greatest dilemma in recruitment is which candidate to select among the best? It often happens that not the candidate who scored highest points in tests is offered the position, but someone, who fits the company culture, and organisation and the actual team best. This is because, even tough somebody performs excellent on intelligence tests and can make a very good impression with his/her work sample, but if this person’s personality does not fit in with the team and company, he can even destruct others in his/her environment.
IT Skills versus Experience
Many companies, especially the ones in IT business, are facing the “IT skills versus experience” paradox when recruiting new work force. No matter what is the company’s main operation it has to use advanced IT tools in order to stay competitive. IT systems play an important role of the company’s every day operations therefore even a little flaw in the system can cause serious inefficiency problems. For this reason the people responsible for the IT systems have lots of responsibility.
Positions with bigger responsibilities require more experience. However, those people who have the necessary skills (like young people) do not have the required working experience. On the other hand people with enough corporate working experience do not have the necessary IT skills. The situation is even worse when you consider a company whose main operation is involved with IT technologies. Most of the positions at those kind of companies require some degree of IT knowledge that the older generation employees might lack. This is a common trade off (skills – experience) that HR managers have to face when recruiting.
PEOPLE DEVELOPMENT & TRAINING
Let’s imagine a situation – new employee has just signed a new contract – company is happy, employee is happy, everyone is happy. And as one of company’s obligations there is a small point – continuous training and education of the new employee. Time is passing, employee performs better and better, company fairly fulfils its duties. But suddenly management starts to realize that employed person is much better then is needed for the position he occupies. And employee understands this too. He starts to feel himself not valued correctly. The problem arises.
The paradox is in a situation, that possibility for developing and constant training may be an important motivation factor for many employees. But at the same time it appears that after a certain time person will become “too good” for the position he is currently in.
As a result we have highly experienced and educated person who is not fitting the position we took him for any more.
We have two possibilities for solving this problem:
- to promote him to a higher position
- or to let him go to another company
But we need him exactly at a place we took him for. Isn’t it a paradox?!
We educate and train employee, he works and does his best, everybody is happy, but only till the moment when employee overcomes the level of his position! After this he starts to think that his knowledge is expanding borders of his position, that he deserved more challenge, more opportunities, more compensation. It is impossible for people to develop forever staying on the same place, and therefore without any perspective to move higher, strong motivation to leave the company for better satisfaction of abilities, knowledge and experience appear.
Also we should not forget, that further development and training is a big incentive for people.
Actually, this is some kind of a prerequisite for any type a job. Because people usually tend to plan their career. And without personal development it is impossible! You will never get promoted is you are not acquiring new knowledge and skills. Basically, it is impossible not upgrade yourself during you work time.
The question is if special training is a special requirement for taking the position or it is not planed and expected to happen “someday” in future.
So should we take those who are not willing to educate themselves?! This sounds ridiculous! But I not, then where to promote the person that is not fitting his level any more?? Should we fire somebody else?
In our opinion the only solution is the growth of the company. Only in this case we and can keep trained employee with the firm, so and promote him.
There is only one small condition – company has to grow with the same speed as employees are developing.
Is it possible?
Depends on a management of the company…
CAREER MANAGEMENT & EQUAL EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITIES
Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) gives all people the right to be considered for any job for which they are skilled and qualified, ensuring that the best person for the job is employed. EEO is based on the principle of recruiting and promoting people on merit. EEO also promotes a working environment free from harassment of any kind, and access for all staff to job-related opportunities, e.g. training and development, promotion and reclassification. The main aim of EEO is to achieve fair practice and behaviour in the workplace. Despite this aim, companies are faced with situation not being able to practice them. Such cases as:
- Recruitment, selection and promotion practices which are open, competitive and based on merit for the company. Merit assessed by clearly defined, job-related criteria ensures that the best applicant is selected for the job. The paradox faced by the company here is that they cannot include preferably age, sex, etc suitable for their in the job advertisements.
- Access for all academic and general staff to training and development. A company would not want to spend so much money on all employees or they may not have enough financial resources to take all employees for training. The company will be faced with financing some employees and leaving the others.
- Grievance handling procedures that is accessible to all academic and general staff and deal with workplace complaints promptly, confidentially and fairly. An example is a mistake made by one of the best employee. The same mistake was made by another employee in the past and got fired in the process. The company is then faced with if they should let their best employee go or take another action.
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No unlawful harassment in the workplace. A company might be faced with a sexual harassment complaint where the company is faced with either compensating employee to protect its name or investigate. Although, this paradox forces the employer into an untenable position of having to defend, from two almost diametrically opposing viewpoints, harassment-related claims arising out of one alleged incident. On the one hand, the person alleging harassment may have a claim against the employer if the allegations are not competently investigated. Conversely, the person being accused of harassment may also have a claim for wrongful discharge for exactly the same reason. As a result, employers now have a far greater need to conduct vigorous and effective investigations when allegations of impropriety first arise.
In career management, the paradox managed here is performance appraisal and advancement planning. In performance management, companies can be faced with accurate/inaccurate performance appraisal underrated/overrated performance appraisal and yet decisions have to be made on that. In the case of performance appraisal, most companies readily acknowledge that performance appraisal should be an essential component of the staffing process, yet when questioned about it, many concede that it is the weak link in the staffing practices of their organization; and in fact, it is frequently performed in a perfunctory, mechanical manner, or ignored altogether. The importance of performance appraisal is to an organization’s health and to its staff members’ well-being, but employees give inadequate attention to a process that is, in practice, treated as inconsequential or even hurtful, by many staff members. Informal approaches to performance appraisal seem to be the most effective approach to employees rather than formal. This, again, raises a paradox or contradiction; most staff members believe that performance appraisal systems are ineffective, yet most report high levels of satisfaction with their positions.
Also, the performance appraisal paradox refers to a weak correlation between performance indicators and performance itself (Meyer & Gupta, 1994; Meyer & O’Shaughnessy, 1993). This phenomenon is caused by the tendency of performance indicators to run down over time. They lose their value as measurements of performance and can no longer discriminate between good and bad performers. As a result, the relationship between actual and reported performance declines. It is important to understand that the paradox is not about performance itself but about the reports on performance. Contrary to the expectation, indicators do not give an accurate report of performance. This could mean that performance is worse than reported (overrated) but also that it is better than reported (underrated). In the latter case, the performance paradox might be considered harmless. However, performance appraisal paradox can be evoked unintentionally or deliberately when the results of performance assessment are used to evaluate organizations or persons.
Lastly, Performance reviews aid management in decision-making related to promotion, advancement, training, salary administration, discipline, and potential termination. Decisions related to discipline and potential terminations are usually the hot button issues that managers in engineering firms want most to avoid. But in firms that ignore or simply overlook performance problems, the problems may grow so large that they put the firm at risk either from a professional liability claim or from some kind of employee relation’s fiasco. The paradox is if you don’t deal openly with a performance issue, you really deal with it all the time. The prevention of larger problems is why continuous feedback and documentation are vital.
To explain that of advance planning of a company a scenario will be given: One in five an interview respondents and one in four of a survey respondents were under 30 years of age. The respondents in the sample who were under 30 were in completely different stages of both family (i.e. no dependent care) and work (less breadth, less experience) life cycles than their colleagues who were over 30. They also provided quite different responses to both the interview and survey items than their older colleagues. Compared to workers in the other age groups, younger respondents were more satisfied with their job and with various elements of their compensation package. They were not, however, more satisfied with their salaries. They had more positive views of the work environment and experienced less work-family conflict (most did not have children), and less job stress. They were more strongly interested than those over 30 in training, challenging assignments, special projects, being mentored, and opportunities to interact with senior management. They placed a greater value than their older colleagues on career growth and advancement. Those in the under 30 age group were more likely than their older co-workers to be the beneficiaries of organizationally supported career development initiatives. For example, they were significantly more likely:
- to say that their manager, their department, and their organization supported their career development;
- to receive more training, more mentoring and more career coaching from their manager; and
- to have the opportunity for intensive training, new challenging assignments, and special work opportunities.
Despite this high level of perceived career development support, those under 30 were no more committed to their organization than their older colleagues and were, in fact, more likely to say that they were considering employment elsewhere (95% have thought of leaving their current organization). Respondents in this group were also more likely to say that if they left they would go another high tech employer. They were also more likely to say that they would leave for compensation related reasons (salary, stock options, high taxes) and for better career development opportunities (more interesting work, technical challenge or opportunities for advancement).
This paradox (higher support but higher intent to turnover) can be partially explained by the fact that while younger employees did seem to receive more support for their career development efforts, not all had made significant progress upwards within their organization a factor that was very important to many in this group.
Empowerment
The idea of empowerment is central to the Human Resource Function. Empowerment should not be about espousal and design of systems alone, but instead should lead to processes that contribute to power equalisation within the organisation. An empowered employee should be capable of understanding both the external and internal environment, and should be equipped with the necessary competencies to act; as and when required without being told to do so. This requires a shift of the control function to within the employee rather than from without, and does not require the employee to wait for orders since he or she is afraid or poorly equipped to act on his or her own.
To be a viable system the organisation must also exercise a degree of control over the output. This would invariably lead to a conflict with the issue of empowerment. How much of empowerment is required? Do control mechanisms need to be done away with altogether?
Minority Laws versus Skills
Some countries, like the US for instance, have minority employment laws, which basically mean that every company is required to have a certain percentage of employees from bigger minority groups. In some cases it might be a problem to find the right experts from different minority groups. As a result of the scarcity of skilled work force in some minority groups the company has to face two choices: 1. hire less skilled employees and train them itself. 2. Or hire the few experts who should probably be overpaid.
Mobility versus Experience
Again, you can discover an HR paradox between the benefits of young employees versus that of more mature and experienced employees. Many multinational companies have positions that require employees to constantly travel abroad and attend meetings, conferences, negotiations that could be very important for the company’s well-being and therefore require lots of responsibility from the employees. This ongoing traveling could be a serious issue for older employees because of their families and other personal reasons. They might only take a job like this if they are “extremely well” compensated, which may not be worth it for the company. However, these employees have the necessary experience with the company and therefore can be trusted with the bigger responsibility.
On the other hand, younger employees probably do not mind traveling abroad often even for less compensation. They are more mobile because they still do not have a family to be taken care of and also young people are generally more flexible. However, they do not have the necessarily work experience at the company that could be required for tasks they have to perform abroad.
The company should choose carefully the employees who will attend official meetings; negotiations because these employees will represent their company abroad and any failure (because of the lack of experience) can seriously hurt the company’s image. It is again an important HR paradox that HR mangers should be aware of when making recruitment decisions.
COMPENSATION & BENEFITS
Merit pay
Because the purpose of the guidelines chart is to balance conflicting pay goals, it compromises, by design, the relationship between merit increases and performance appraisal ratings. The highest rated performers will not always be the employees with the highest percentage increase. It is rather evident that superior performers in quintiles 1,2, and 3 can receive a percentage increase as much as or even more than that of an outstanding performer in quintile 5. As a result, employees are likely to learn that pay increases are not determined just by performance.
CONCLUSION
These paradoxes cannot be resolved, at best they can be understood and harmonised with. Crucial to harmony, is the development of a framework for action that would dictate the nature of systems and processes in the organisation, in short the development of a culture which is infused with both ethical values and the goals and processes of the Human Resource Function.
SOURCES AND REFERENCES:
Bohlander, George, and Scott Snell. (2004): Managing Human Resources. 13th ed.: Thomson South-Western
Griffin, Ricky W., & Ebert, Ronald J. (2002): Business. 6th ed.: Prentice Hall
Marina Dikanova, “Human Portrait of a Modern Economy”, IT news, #14, 27 July 2004, retrieved 29 April 2005, from
Gregory Prastacos, Klas Soderquist, Yiannis Spanos, Luk Van Wassenhove, An Integrated Framework for Managing Change in the New Competitive Landscape, European Management Journal Vol. 20, No. 1, pp. 55–71, 2002
Ritesh Agrawal, HR: Seeking success in times of paradox, Career Fusion, retrieved 1 May 2005 from http://www.careerfusion.com/articles/strategic7.htm
https://www.patrick.af.mil/deomi/research%20main%20pages/MEOCS
http://www.csse.ca/CJE/Articles/FullText/CJE20-3/CJE20-3-11Smith.pdf