Taylor and Francis Group is part of the Academic Publishing Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 3099067.

Informa

Students: Chapter 2

Click on the tabs below to view the content for each chapter.

Quizzes

Self-test Questions

  1. Name four alternative courses of action that should be considered before recruiting takes place.
  2. What alternatives are there to advertising when looking to attract applicants?
  3. Set out five issues that need to be considered when creating and maintaining interest in a job advertisement.
  4. What are six essential components of a job description?
  5. Give four examples of third parties that can be used in the recruitment process.
  6. Detail three potential disadvantages of telephone screening.
  7. Detail four methods to collect the information you need for job analysis, according to Taylor.
  8. Identify five difficulties associated with using technology in recruitment.
  9. What was the theme of the revised Adidas branding?
  10. What is a competency profile?
Answers

1. Select four from:

  • Do away with the work altogether
  • Automate the work
  • Contract out the work
  • Reorganise the work
  • Reorganise the hours

2. Word of mouth, including relatives

  • Approaching previous applicants
  • Local mailshot through commercial leaflet distributor
  • Milk round to universities and colleges
  • Open days and hotel walk-ins
  • Sign outside site

3. Select five from:

  • Does the advertisement concentrate on stressing the positive?
  • Is the image of the company matched by the tone of the advertisement?
  • How much is said about salary?
  • How genuinely meaningful is the text?
  • Is the location of the position given?
  • Should the level of benefits be spelled out?

4. Select six from:

  • Job title
  • Job location
  • The superior to whom the job holder reports
  • The staff who are responsible to the job holder
  • The overall purpose of the job
  • Whether it can be full-time or part-time
  • Most frequently performed duties, with some indication of their importance

5.  Recruitment agencies

  • Advertising agencies
  • Executive search agencies
  • Job centres
  • Educational establishments

6. Select three from:

  • Applicants may not want to be judged quite so quickly and mechanically
  • Judgements may enter into world of discrimination or stereotyping
  • Applicants may not respond well to telephone interviews
  • They make unreasonable demands on the time of the applicant
  • Forms are often not completed by the applicant or they use false names
  • Sites do not keep their promises

7. Ask employees to complete a questionnaire

  • Ask employees to keep diaries
  • Observe the employee
  • Interview the employee

8. Select five from:

  • Online applications can take up an unreasonable time for applicants
  • Applicants may not like to be judged electronically
  • Problems of negative online profiles
  • Online psychometric tests can be too expedient
  • Applications can be filled in with false names and applicants can receive help with tests
  • Live telephone interviews can be discriminatory
  • Restraints of telephone interviews compared to face-to-face
  • Sites do not keep their promises on follow-up action

9. Mind, Body and Soul.

10. It lays down the essential competencies required for effective performance in the job in question.

Annotated Further Reading Guide

Brown, J. (2011) The Complete Guide to Recruitment. Kogan Page.

A practical guide to best practice.

Brown, J. and Swain, A. (2012) The Professional Recruiters Handbook: Delivering Excellence in Recruitment Practice. Kogan Page.

Foster, C. (2011) British Transport Police: Tackling Unconscious Bias in Recruitment. Equal Opportunities Review, September, 216: 18–21.

An instructive case study.

Fox, A. (2012) Make a ‘Deal’. HR Magazine, January, 57(1): 37–38.

Linking corporate mission and values with talent management process.

Martin, G., Gollan, P. and Grigg, K. (2011) Is there a Bigger and Better Future for Employer Branding? International Journal of HRM, October, 22(17): 3618–3637.

Links branding with corporate governance, innovation and organisational reputation.

For a more theoretical approach, see:

O’Meara, B. and Petzall, S. (eds) (2013) Handbook of Strategic Recruitment and Selection. Emerald Group Publishing Group.

For an analysis of the use of competencies in recruitment, see:

IRS (2003) Sharpening up Recruitment and Selection with Competencies. IRS Employment Review 782, 15 August, 42–48.

Advertising and recruitment

For advice and further details on using interns, see the CIPD Internship Charter at www.cipd.co.uk

Employer branding

Rosethorn, H. (2009) The Employer Brand. Gower.

Schumann, M. and Sartain, L. (2009) Brand for Talent: Eight Essentials to Make your Talent as Famous as your Brand. Barnes and Noble.

For more details on the successes and pitfalls of using social media, see:

Anand, R. (2010) Recruiting with Social Media. QUE Publishing.

Extra Case Studies

Case 1

Successful social media – Random House and IBM

Random House, a publisher strong in digital applications, relaunched its recruitment website in 2012 with the following features:

  • All 14 members of the HR team are on Twitter so potential applicants can talk directly to them.
  • Candidates are asked to make videos of themselves – around 25 applicants do so on average for each vacancy.
  • Work experience is advertised with the result that its Facebook site has become a community for interns past, present and future.
  • Knowledge management is featured, with staff around the world being encouraged to share knowledge and test ideas in a structured way, giving staff a network of people doing similar jobs.

IBM has social media divided into four areas – collaboration, recruitment, learning and recognition.

IBM Connections is a tool employees use to communicate with each other around the world. There is a UK HR team with its own secure group where ideas can be exchanged in live forums or ‘jams’.

In the recognition sphere, IBM has its ‘Blue Thanks’ tool, which allows staff to thank their colleagues – and copy in the recipient’s manager.

The social media programme is seen as being associated with ‘fun’ and informality, with the need to have the ability to be yourself, showing more of who you are.

Source: De Vita, E. (2012) This is What Successful Social Media Looks Like. People Management, November, 40–44.

Case 2

Recruiting for Formula 1 team

In the glamorous, fast-paced world of Formula 1, it is hard to imagine any of the teams finding it hard to source skilled candidates. With many people dreaming of working in the high-pressured environment of the ‘grid’, it is hardly an industry with an image problem.

But, as a relatively new Formula 1 team, Marussia has faced recruitment challenges. The team entered Formula 1 in 2009, thanks to the Resource Restriction Agreement, which enabled teams to enter the competition based on the quality of their engineering rather than how much financial investment they could make. Prior to this, Marussia was a Formula 3 team with just 80 staff.

Katie Allen, Marussia’s HR director, began her search for talent as a one-woman operation, and even now she runs an HR team of just three. Most of the established Formula 1 teams tend to employ between 300 and 500 people; Marussia has recently increased headcount at its Banbury headquarters to around 200.

Widening the reach

But finding the specialist skills required to compete on the same level as the more established teams has not been easy. Until last year, Marussia had relied on traditional recruitment methods such as headhunting, and many referrals came – and still come – through word of mouth at races. ‘This is quite a close-knit industry, teams travel together, so it’s like a family,’ explains Allen. ‘A lot of networking goes on, and it’s fair to say that a lot of successful candidates come to us that way.’

‘However, we needed to increase our geographical reach in terms of candidates,’ she adds. ‘There are a number of good universities in France that run aerodynamics courses, for example.’

In late 2011, in order to widen its pool of candidates, Marussia approached job board Monster to become its official recruitment partner and to advertise its vacancies, including specialist roles such as design engineers and a travelling composite technician. Since February 2012, Marussia has recruited 23 of the 40 roles it needed through Monster’s site. Did Allen have any reservations about using a generalist recruitment site to advertise such specialist roles? ‘We decided to use Monster because of its global reach. Of course, we still work with niche recruitment agencies, but as a small HR operation it’s important for us to widen our pool of candidates,’ she says. Another challenge was that, as a relatively small team trying to make its way up the grid with limited resources, it was difficult to set itself apart from bigger teams with greater financial clout. ‘It’s a competitive landscape,’ says Allen. ‘We all face the same challenges in terms of resourcing, and we can’t always offer the same benefits package as other teams.’

Communicating benefits

It has been important, therefore, to demonstrate to potential candidates that whoever comes into the business will gain responsibility very quickly and be part of the team’s future success. One of the company’s composite developers, Jonathan Block, has seen many of the parts he has worked with on the track. ‘I feel I have had more responsibilities as part of a smaller team,’ he says. While the company does not currently offer an apprenticeship scheme, this could be an avenue to explore in the future, says Allen.

To give candidates a flavour of its employer brand, Marussia has used a combination of social media and video content. Allen, Marussia and CEO Andy Webb have recorded videos of them discussing the attributes they look for in new team members, and the company has also posted video interviews with new hires talking about their first week on the job. The videos have been viewed more than 250,000 times. ‘Being able to demonstrate your company culture is really important, especially with passive candidates. It’s not just about a glossy video,’ says Allen.

There are, of course, many speculative applications from Formula 1 fans, and Marussia has also partnered with Monster to use its cloud-based applicant management system, recently whittling down 7,000 applications for a junior engineer position to 2,000. All CVs that come into the company, whether they are sent directly, come through a job board or through an agency, are managed centrally.

Graeme Lowdon, Marussia’s president and sporting director, explains that finding the right talent is not just ‘nice to have’, but a business imperative for the team. ‘Grand Prix dates don’t change, so, if we recruit the wrong staff or don’t have the skills, it has an immediate impact on our performance.’ For a small but growing team that recently achieved its best result to date – 12th in the Singapore Grand Prix – meeting recruitment targets could turn around its fortunes.

Source: Faragher, J. (2012) Winning Formula: How F1’s Marussia Sources Hard-to-find Skills. Personnel Today, 31 October.