Introduction

Today, strategic decisions are related to human resource considerations. For an example, in an information and knowledge-based economy, success depends on an organization’s ability to manage human capital.

Human capital refers to economic value of the knowledge, experience, skills and capabilities of employees. To build human capital, HRM develops strategies for ensuring a workforce with superior knowledge and skills. This means recruiting to find the best talent, enhancing their skills and knowledge with training programs and opportunities for personal and professional development, and providing compensation and benefits that enhance the sharing of knowledge and appropriately reward people for their contributions to the organization.

The act of recruiting is the organization’s ability to sell their culture and opportunities to individuals who are in search of employment, while simultaneously matching the needs of the organization with the qualifications of the individuals. Nowadays, employees are viewed as assets of the company. Employees, not buildings and machinery, give a company a competitive advantage. Employees take more responsibility and control in their jobs, especially in service industry, becoming partners in business improvement rather than cogs in a machine. It is because human labor can easily be replaced by machine. Clearly, the organization now requires people with different know-how, skills and abilities. Strategic recruitment helps organization find the human capital necessary to run effectively.

Body

Recruitment forms the first stage in the process, which continues with selection and ends with the placement of the candidate. It follows the HR planning function. Recruiting makes it possible to acquire the number and type of people necessary to ensure the continued operation of an organization. Hence, recruitment is considered as one of the most important functions in an organization.

The recruitment scenario has undergone complete change in the wake of various factors affecting the organizations. From being a staff function, it has now become a strategic priority of organizations to attract and retain the best talent in the market. However, competition is having its toll on recruitment, as organizations are competing with each other to attract the talented pool of professionals.

Assessing Organizational Needs

An important step in recruiting is to understand what kinds of people the organization needs. Basic of building blocks of human resource management include job analysis, job descriptions, and job specifications.

Job analysis is a systematic process of gathering and interpreting information about the essential duties, tasks and responsibilities of a job, as well as about the context within which the job is performed. To perform job analysis, managers or specialists ask about work activities and work flow, the degree of supervision given and received in the job, knowledge, and skills needed, performance standards, working conditions. The manager then prepares a written job description which is a clear of the specific tasks, duties, and responsibilities, and job specification.

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The process of job analysis is particularly useful to assess organization and job accountabilities. As HR manager makes decisions to effect work improvements, HR manager will be able to reassign accountabilities to better accommodate effective work flows and to gain better utilization of human resources.

Factors Affecting Recruitment

All Organizations, large or small, have to engage in recruitment. Some of them delegate the job to HR Managers, while others involve the HR Managers directly on the job. Some organizations continuously indulge in recruitment while others may do it infrequently. Here, size may be an important factor. For example, ...

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