Human Resource Management: Recruitment and Selection - Essay Example

Human Resource Management: Recruitment and Selection The challenges that the changing workplace poses for professionals in recruitment and selectionare serious. If they can be met successfully, I/O psychologists and HR managers can become important players in the strategic management process. After years of being viewed as a minor part of the organizational support system, organizations have reached a point in history when the ability to procure the right personnel and deploy them to the right jobs at the right time is considered critical to organizational success. To profit from this situation, Starbucks shows that participation in these activities adds unique value. The organization under analysis is Starbucks Coffee, the leading coffee roaster and retailer company which operates on the American and European Community markets (www.starbucks.com). 1. Starbucks introduce the recruitment and selection based on equal opportunities policies. They include racial and national diversity of the staff, fair treatment of all recruiters in spite of their religion, sexual orientation, social background, marital status, age and disability. The main advantage of Starbucks Coffee HR management is that it does not consider recruitment and selection in isolation, but in the context of the overall manpower plan and personnel management action program. For example, it investigates the potential of the persons appointed for training, development and future promotion; and their flexibility and adaptability to possible new methods, procedures or working conditions. In anticipation of a suitable applicant being selected, Starbucks have also prepared an orientation script and training proposal to assist both with their smooth transition into the role, together with their future development and advancement (Armstrong, 2003). The first step includes position requirements, needs and skills identification, selection of the tools to be used. During this process, strategic areas of competency are identified. These are broken down into number of clusters and a series of specific individual competency requirements. For example, the strategic competency business knowledge and skills, had marketing as one of the items in its cluster, and understanding the strengths and weaknesses of competition as one of the individual competency requirements (Stone 2005). Starbucks Coffee uses both online and off line recruitment which helps to attract wider target audiences of job seekers. One of the critical differences among Internet recruiters is the method by which their service matches candidates with jobs. Bulletin boards allow employers to search using key words they choose but do not participate actively in making matches. Other types of services take advantage of computer technology to varying degrees in the method they use to match candidate characteristics with the requirements of open jobs (Stone 2005). For off line recruitment, Starbucks uses recruitment agencies and advertising in press. The recruitment and selection practices are based on the interview structure and practical assessment of skills and knowledge of employees, his/her psychological peculiarities and ability to work in teams. The main types of practices are: "behavior-based interviews, training and experience evaluations, ability tests, biographical data, motivational fit inventories" (Armstrong 2003, p. 338). In Starbucks, the practices are based on collecting, measuring and evaluation of the information about recruiters and their skills. Usually, the selection process is based on the interview method. Interview consists of two stages (HR manager's evaluation and interview with the department manager). During interviews, two distinct strategies for selection are used by Starbucks. One strategy, used for managers and leadership positions, suggests that in an environment of rapidly changing job demands, selection based on general abilities such as intelligence, conscientiousness, or adaptability will contribute most to the overall effectiveness of the organization. The second strategy, used for manual workers, suggests that effectiveness is enhanced when selection is based on evaluation of the applicant's ability to perform the behaviors needed to do the job for which he or she is being hired. During the interview, the company's staff assesses educational background and working experience, commitment to high performance and adaptability, ability to acquire new knowledge and skills, ability to work with others and a team member. In the changing world of work, employees at all levels will need to go back for formal training many times during their careers in addition to engaging in less formal learning in order to keep pace with workplace changes. Furthermore, many newly emerging jobs demand rapid acquisition of cognitively complex skills. Thus, there is a strong argument to be made that a test of mental or cognitive ability should be part of the selection battery for every job. The best available measures of interpersonal skills assess focused and job-specific competencies rather than general personal attributes. Measures of the Big Five personality characteristic of extroversion have been used successfully to predict job performance for managerial and sales occupations but not for others in which the interpersonal component is less dominant. As more types of jobs require significant interaction with others, the validity of extroversion for predicting job success may become higher, and more general, but its use as an across-the-board assessment of interpersonal skills cannot be recommended on the basis of the current evidence (Armstrong 2003). Another practice used by the company is analysis provided by industrial-organizational (I/O) psychologists who are trained in selection and assessment. On the one hand, the I/O psychologists are asked to implement a recruitment and selection process designed by the client and are evaluated on the basis of how rigorously they followed the client's specifications. On the other hand, the I/O psychologists have received extensive professional training as independent professionals and may decide that in their professional judgment the client's procedures could be improved. As psychologists depart from traditional consulting roles, these questions will need to be confronted. 2. The policies developed and followed by Starbucks are very effective because they allow HR to recruit skillful staff able to meet organizational demands without additional training. The effectiveness of these practices is that these include clinical assessments of personality by unqualified interviewers or assessors, projective tests with questionable psychometric properties (Stone 2005). Staffing experts would like to have job performance-related measures of a variety of personality characteristics that are hypothesized to contribute to success in the new workplace, particularly those associated with responsibility, self-management, adaptability to change, and ability to get along with others. However, despite psychologists' ability to obtain reliable, construct-valid measures of five major personality factors-extroversion, openness to experience, emotional stability, agreeableness, and conscientiousness- only conscientiousness has been consistently linked to job performance. Employees who are conscientious, that is, responsible, dependable, organized, and persistent are more successful than those who are not. Conscientiousness is clearly related to one of the primary demands placed on employees in the new workforce: commitment to high performance and the responsibility and self-management to achieve it (Stone 2005). It is important to note that conscientiousness was a stronger predictor of performance in high autonomy than in low-autonomy jobs because many alternative work arrangements (for example, telecommuting, contracting, self-managed work teams) emphasize autonomy. The assessment of conscientiousness, or the related construct of integrity, is becoming part of the selection process in an increasing number and variety of organizations. To function effectively in the new workforce, most individuals will have to be able to continually acquire new knowledge and skills; adjust successfully to a series of temporary assignments with varying demands; commit themselves to and achieve high performance on each job; and work well with a variety of other people, including customers, perhaps as part of a team. One result of the expanded requirements for success at work is that HR personnel are being asked to assess and evaluate a broader range of competencies than before. This is certainly good for the selection business, but it also raises a problem. Although valid, cost-effective methods of assessing some of these competencies are widely available. This situation provides a golden opportunity for developing new selection tools, but the pressure to produce assessments whether or not valid instruments are available also provides fertile ground for charlatans peddling magic cures to all selection ills. Even well-trained and ethical HR professionals are caught between the need to be responsive to management and the limitations imposed by the current state of knowledge (Stone 2005). The effectiveness of these policies is explained by the fact that Starbucks accepts many decisions on staffing practices within the context of external pressures. As a whole, flexible staffing in all its forms is very popular in Starbucks than in the other organizations. The practical developments of these areas provide the possibility of building more effective systems of HRM and likely assist in the future development of Starbucks. The existence of effective and innovative recruitment and selection policies is most strongly influenced by corporate strategy. 3. To improve its selection and recruitment process, Starbucks could implement new technological solutions to improve selection processes. HR In terms of new methods, the new environment means Starbucks should be selective in introducing computer-driven recruitment and selection. Although HR can benefit greatly from emerging technology, it must avoid being seduced into ignoring evidence of validity-or its absence. Delivery systems should not be confused with the substance of what is being delivered. Computer technology could be of immense value if it substitutes multimedia or interactive realistic job previews for early organizational contact for applicants from remote sites. One of the most innovative applications of selection technology is in the use of live telephone call-centered role-play exercises to assess candidates for customer contact positions (for example, customer service representative, account executive, telemarketer, technical assistance provider). The Telephone Assessment Program (TAP) of Assessment Solutions, Inc. (ASI) is a state-of-the-art example of this type of system. In consultation with subject matter experts from the client organization, ASI designs job- and organization-specific simulations to assess candidates' abilities to perform key aspects of the target job. Each exercise is modeled directly on the job and simulates common types of calls the customer representative would receive. In a typical assessment, candidates (at testing centers sponsored by the client) are provided with written background materials, including a simplified set of procedures and guidelines on how to deal with customer queries, and are given time to review these materials. They then receive a series of eight or nine telephone calls from "customers" who are actually trained assessors at ASI headquarters working from a structured script. Each call, which lasts several minutes, is conducted by a different assessor and is designed to evaluate a different but overlapping set of skills. Every assessor uses a structured multidimensional on-line rating form to document and evaluate the candidate's performance. Performance on each dimension, in each call, is compared with the ability level needed to succeed on the job, as predetermined by a job analysis at the client organization. Scores are then mechanically combined, and a dimensional and overall performance report is generated for each candidate. Advantages of this approach are that it can be conducted remotely with candidates virtually anywhere in the world, it provides a realistic preview of the target job, and it reliably yet relatively inexpensively captures actual samples of behavior using specially trained assessors (Armstrong 2003). In sum, effective recruitment and selection of employees for the core workforce that provides the organization with stability and continuity has become essential for organizational survival and presents another set of challenges. There is already intense competition for workers who are talented enough to be a part of the core, and this is predicted to become even fiercer. Each member of the core is expected to perform multiple "jobs" and handle multiple responsibilities, as well as to maintain long-term loyalty to the organization. Because organizations do not have a long-term claim on these workers, the need for effective methods to recruit contingent personnel quickly is increasing. Furthermore, the importance of accurately assessing potential employees before hire is escalating dramatically. People with whom the organization has little history are brought in to play important and responsible roles; they are expected to be fully functional immediately, with no probationary period, training, or mentoring. In addition, many of these workers do not have the traditional employee's accountability, nor is the organization always able to monitor or supervise them closely. Under these conditions, the cost of hiring the wrong person is very high. Bibliography 1. Armstrong, M. (2003). Human Resource Management. Kogan Page. 2nd edn. Boston: Kent Publishing. 2. Stone, R.J. (2005) Human Resource Management 5th Edition, Milton : John Wiley and Sons Australia, Ltd. 3. www.starbucks.com Read More