Recruitment and Selection

What is Recruitment?

In short, recruitment is the process of recruiting staff by identifying, qualifying, and encouraging job seekers and potential candidates to apply for a vacant position.

Many include the selection of the best applicants as part of recruitment, though this is technically separate (more on that further down).

Recruitment forms the foundation of your business. Without the right people applying to work at your business, your operational processes, specialised equipment, and billion-dollar-ideas aren’t going to cut it. That’s why it’s important to invest in this first step, because cutting corners now may make things seem easier now, but ultimately your cost of recruitment and turnover will be higher.

There are two types of recruitment, most businesses and organisations will utilise both forms of recruitment as they grow. Those forms of recruitment are Internal Recruitment and External Recruitment. Internal Recruitment involves sourcing a qualified candidate for a role from within the organisation that is hiring. Inversely, External Recruitment leverages outside sources of talent for filling a vacant position. 

What is selection?

Selection is the process of selecting one or more applicants for a vacant position based on a qualification process. 

These qualification processes often include a screening of resumes based on position descriptions. Then one or more interviews where the applicant pool is further refined before reference checks are carried out. Then, depending on the number of remaining candidates, or the selection strategy put in place by the hiring manager, either a candidate is selected or this process continues until a candidate is selected.

Selection stands to be one of the most expensive and time consuming elements of your hiring endeavours. Not only that, but it can be expensive and time consuming for the potential employees too, as they may need to travel or take time off of their current job in order to participate in your qualification. This is why it’s extremely important to optimise the process and to limit the selection process to only appropriate candidates.

What is the recruitment and selection process?

Recruitment and selection procedures vary from business to business and industry to industry, though there are several key elements involved in most recruitment and selection strategies. 

Those elements stemming from Recruitment are:

1. Identify the Need. 
2. Assess Your Requirements
3. Advertise the Vacancy
4. Attract and Invite Candidates to Apply

Then, when it comes to Selection:

1. Assessing Applications
2. Shortlisting the Best Candidates
3. Conducting Interviews
4. Reference Checking
5. Selecting the Right Person for the Job

Some businesses like to manage these steps themselves, whereas others don’t have the in-house knowledge or experience necessary to source the best talent, and decide to seek help instead. That’s where Human Resources Consultants like us come in. 

If you have questions about any of the above steps, or would like us to manage the process for you, please contact us for a risk free 30-min consultation with one of our recruitment specialists. Book yourself in at the bottom of this page or by filling out the form on our contact page here.

What is the Cost of Recruitment and Selection?

Sadly, there’s no clear answer to this question. Rather, many factors influence the cost of any given recruitment strategy. 

Firstly, it’s important to understand that two kinds of costs apply here, direct costs and indirect costs.

The direct costs associated with recruitment and selection might be:

• The fee to advertise your vacant role
• The cost in man hours needed to qualify and select the ideal candidate
• A placement fee payable to a recruitment agent that managed the above for you
• A consulting fee payed to an expert that helped you establish or improve your system

Some of the indirect costs include:

• Time and money wasted by investing in the wrong applicant
• Damage to your reputation due to a poor interviewing process
• Training up a new employee that did not meet the requirements needed of the role

These costs may vary themselves, depending on how many applicants you plan on sourcing, how difficult the role is to fill, the hiring experience had by your hiring manager, and more.

For more detailed advice, contact Akyra today to discuss your recruitment and selection needs.