“There is something that is much scarcer, something rarer than ability. It is the ability to recognize ability.” — Robert Half
Above quotation extracted from recruitment expert Robert Half not explains only the scarcity of talents, but also describe the rarity of talent to recognize the abilities. Providing a background scheme to this analysis the report will discuss about a local software company which very recently started its operations to provide Research and Development Services for global software Giant for their data mining products.
The local organization already had over 10 years experience in the software Industry. But virtually they had no experience to R&D in data mining. However, in order to have this project, local management was too eager to take the risk. Their plan was to hire 120 new Engineers, and train them to achieve the same level of competency of the foreign client within two years. In order to facilitate the process foreign expatriates were brought in from the client organization. Organization was very success to brand their direct link to the Global giant. Compared with the industry they declared to offer best pays to the Engineers. With no delay they found very success in recruiting a talented pool of experienced qualified professionals to their work force letting them more time to train the staff. Company stayed top in the university rankings for fresh graduates.
Unfortunately the success in recruitment did not prolong. The codes were not meeting the standards of foreign client. Then they decided to train employees on code quality. However, it was less successful than expected. After two years, at a senior management meeting organization openly declared that their recruitment process is having some issues and they have not recruited the right people. Following that they brought to restructure the organization to rectify the roles. Surprisingly the core employees to the organization quit very soon damaging the whole image of organization as a R&D center. Later to attract talented employees organization had to introduce costly programs like “Referral Reward Scheme (RRS)” with 50% of 6 month salary bonus to the employee who effectively contribute to bring in a single successful candidate.
Above failure followed by a successful recruitment of scarce talents, paves the way for this report. Report’s objective is to find out how organizations could do better in hiring high skilled people and based on that final recommendations were given.
Recruitment cannot be considered as a single stage purpose. According to Garry (2008) recruitment and selection process is a series of hurdles aimed at selecting best candidate for job. There he defined the following steps for success of recruitment process.
Figure 1 : Recruitment process suggested by Garry Dessler (2008)
Report uses above model to evaluate each given stage at the recruitment process of above organization. With each step the report will find out the issues to be dealt with and the important decisions to be made. There it will also look in to alternative ways and potential outcomes.
3.1 Employment planning and forecasting
At this stage, report expected to discuss importance of proper job analysis while looking into planning and forecasting. At the time the organization plan to start its R&D product was at maturity stage. Therefore, most the Jobs available to R&D were hypothetically to improve existing features or fix existing bugs. Company failed to understand this. Organization wanted to hire kind of entrepreneur high skilled innovative top technical talents. Doing that organization have expected to prove their capability to recruit top talents, to the foreign client. But that improper motive should have missed the essence of importance of job analysis at the early stage of recruitment. Moving with the time along with this staff, organization sound many quality issues with their services. Later it was realized that the employees found themself not happy to the tasks they were assigned with. These set of employees had joined the organization with great expectations to do high skilled technical design oriented R&D works. But the tasks they found were much quality oriented and maintenances oriented. Contrast to Client culture, local developers thought doing quality and maintenance related works hinders their career progression and professional dignity. They may also knew that they had a good demand outside.
Employees openly complaint to the management about their intrinsic demotivation over the tasks and roles assigned. But management failed to do more as that was the nature of job that they had. This stared an informal power struggle between top developers and management where the top talents decided to leave the organization.
Above is best evident that this organization had not done a proper job analysis. It also showed their professional immaturity in recruitment for business needs.
Professor Ipek Kalemcin (2003) find following five factors must be reflected from a staffing plan. Next it will review the planning process of the orgnaization aginst these factors.
| Stautus | Symbol |
| Favourable
|  |
| Un favourable
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Figure 2 : Indicators of favorability
| Factors to consider at staff planning | Review |
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| 1. Projected turnover (as a result of resignations or terminations) | This was done to a certain level. But organization never expected such an imediate employee turnover. |
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| 2. Quality and skills of employees (in relation to what you see as the changing needs of your organization) | They rarely planned the need to the change of roles. Later realized the dynamic need of frequent role changes due to the nature of job offered by the client. |
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| 3. Strategic decisions to upgrade the quality of products or services or enter into new markets | At the early stages they only expected the head count. Lowest level roles were asigned according to the instant availability. Just did what the foreign client requested. |
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| 4. Technological and other changes resulting in increased productivity
| Local management failed to forecast changes. Foreign client communicated the changes well in advance. But the management took more time to realize them. |  |
| 5. The financial resources available to your department. | Finance wise organization have tough controls. Department managers always took recruitment decisions, and were effectively financed with their needs. |
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Figure 3 : Review against the factors for Planning
According to above review it is evident that organization did not had a comprehensive recruitment plan. It seems the recruitmets were decided most the time to the gut feeling despite the available HR principles and models. Organization could have done better in recruitment if they had properly planed the roles with what they critically want considering the changing needs of business.
Dessler (2008) suggest like all good plans, management must build employment plans on basic forecasts. He suggests three areas to consider for an effective employement forcast.
| Areas to be considered in forcasts | Review |
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| 1. Personal needs | Personal needs were never forcasted. If they did forcast they will not hire highskilled developers for quality asuarance and maintainance tasks. |
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| 2. Forecasting the supply of outside candidates
| Oragnization never did this. They believed that they can atract a good crowd if they spend enough. |
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| 3. Forecasting the supply of internal candidates. | They had an internal project which was at the decline phase. They just wanted to move them for the new project, with even assessing their capabilities. İt was after the first performance review organization realize majority of these cadres not fitting the job and they wanted to move them to other projects. |
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Figure 4: Review on employment Forecasts
Above review will best evident to why this organization failed to forecast. At recruitment they showed no commitment towards personal need forecasts which end up filling their positions with unfitting personal objectives. They never forecast the internal supply of candidates, but absorb internal individuals without assessing and forecasting their fit to the available roles. If organization was able to successfully forecast above, they had a good chance to avoid recruiting unfitting talents. Fitting talents to the role may have created a pleasant working environment avoiding many confusions and demotivations.
So it is proved that if used HR management principles and findings this organization could have done better in employment planning and forecasting at their recruitment process. It is also evident that recruitment of fitting talents to the fitting role is more important than recruiting top talents to every position.
3.2 Build a pool of candidates
Organization was very successful in doing that at initial stages as they declared to offer industry best salaries. They successfully brand their direct link to global giant in order to attract a good crowd. They used extensively the newspaper advertisements as well as the web for market communication. The recruitment advertisement was also effectively used as a way to communicate the existence of business. Even they made advertisements to industry magazines and journals as well as to the university notice boards.
Anyway the organization’s early success in making an effective pool of candidate through intense communication of benefits did not prolong. Later due to the drastic drop of organization reputation makes it harder to get collect some good CVs. Organization was earning a bad word of mouth from the desperate leavers. So the report realizes the need of maintaining a good employee reputation to attract a good pool of fitting skills.
Application selection was done from the collection of CVs brought over web. Applications were reviewed manually and IT was not much used to sort them out. They had to use a simple IT based system to sort the applications so that it reduces the search efficiency. There were three HR members hired but they were not intervened to this. Team leads instantly went through applications and approve them to call for interviews. They did not go through the all applications, but selected some random samples to select the best. Many times internal employees brought new applications and management put more bias to the applications which came through known employees. However, since the selected applicants had to go through a series of selection tests and interviews, correct selection of appropriate applications supported by IT may save time to interview inappropriate employees. It must be appreciated that application selectors try to give equal priority to practical performers compared academic performances.
3.4 Selection Tests and Interviews
Once a good application found, the candidate is called for tests. If the candidate does well with the tests he will be called for interviews. That brief the Organization’s tests and interview process.
Tests were done by selecting questions from a repository. Senior engineers created the test questions and many times just copied them from internet and filled the repository. This was not a good practice as the test questions were more generic than what it actually required to the position specifically. On the other hand questions were indeed tough and were testing only the technical competences. Quality aspects of the work was least tested. Later organization noticed that there are some quality issues. It was not meeting the client quality standards. Even by providing sophisticated training programs developers found not interested in improving quality aspects of work as expected. The most reason for that could be developers hired are more feature oriented. It is the general behavior of the local software industry is that developers are mainly focusing the development phase of software product life cycle. They thought quality oriented work are challenging their dignity of proficiency. Quality related works are being treated as a task of unimportant non skilled tasks by genius local developers. Breaking these believes were hard. Many thought that getting quality related works will hinder their personal career growth and they ultimately decided to move for other opportunities. If organization could have test the seriousness of quality needs for the business they must have test that during interviews and tests. Even they could examine the candidate work samples for the quality aspects.
Language communication skills were tested adequately for all levels. For senior positions they used the interview with foreign client so that to make sure candidate is comfortable in communication. However, the interviews put less focus to make sure that candidate is culturally savvy. Cultural aspects were least regarded but the language skills. If interviews were able to communicate that need, or even test that need – organization may have stopped many cross cultural conflicts that were found intense enough for some resignations. Even the many interviewers thought the interview is a medium to introduce the new role to selected candidate who was successfully through the selection test. It was even a belief about top management as they all are technical people. They thought “If you can get through the selection test, interview is nothing much - but your job”. That will explain the immature nature of HR process at interviewing. On the other hand interviews were done by a random selected group. But essentially one member represented the team where the interviewee is to be recruited. However many times the other two participants were acting as observers as they hardly understood the job, as they are representatives of different teams. Most the time the leads who got effective bargaining power may get the opportunity to call for vacancies. Vacancies were always defined by gut feeling not by a proper analysis. There for majority of interviewers in the panel will have very less awareness about the job. It was noticed that some interviewers clarify the role after interviewing is completed.
Above brief will best explain the need of HR professionalism to the practice of selection tests and interviewing process. If had adequate HR knowledge, organization may have avoid many unfitting decisions.
Organization’s orientation and the introductory period to the job was highly appreciated by recruits and was well organized. Orientation was twofold; overview and job-specific. Enough time was given to familiarize the product and no pressure was put on to the employees on this period to involve in serious tasks. Mistakes were highly tolerated. Trainings were provided based on the experience position and skill level. Even the foreign client was surprised to the speedy absorption of technology by new recruits.
There for Orientation (or lack of it) will make a significant difference in how quickly an employee can become more productive, and also has long term effects for the organization.
Author Dessler (2008) defines five factors of recruitment complexities which make the process more complex. Following will review how these factors affect the organization.
Ø Recruitment should be aligned to strategy
Organization failed to realize the strategy of the foreign client they work for. Initially it was thought that they were to do more with more design and development kind of work, later it was realized it was to do more with maintenance. However product was at its maturity stage too. But there were also some feature development works as well. As a result management failed to bring clarity to recruitment against strategy.
Ø Type of Job
As discussed before organization failed to predefine correctly the type of job. Most the times lowest level recruits were dynamically deployed to many different teams without a proper planning. Many employees resist these unplanned temporary task assignments.
Ø Pre-screening
Application selection was done from a pool of collected CVs. But no explicit prescreening was done for many positions. Familiarity of the applicants to the existing staff was effectively used. However a considerable effort was put to select appropriate applications manually by reading the CVs.
Ø Image
Organization had a reputed history. With the direct links to the global giants they took the attention of many employees. This facilitates them to attract good CVs.
Ø Employment law
Employment law was best followed during the recruitment process.
There for reviewed above complexities at above organization, it is proved that organization failed to realize the strategic need of Human resource. At the same time they failed to realize and plan the scope of individual jobs to the developers (Lowest level). As a result they failed to resolve the recruiting complexities which lead to make their failures to retain top talents.
6. Recommendations
Given above facts it is very evident that success of recruitment is not ensured by just hiring top qualified most experienced reputed professionals. Individuals can be very skillful in their distinct disciplines. But there will be no use for these skills if these individuals cannot bring the expected synergy to the available job. As highlighted in the top quote, just bringing the scares abilities will not be sufficient. Organization’s recruitment process must also have the adequate competence to recognize these abilities as well. On the other hand recruiters must realize the job. There must be a comprehensive job analysis and planning. This must be done considering strategic needs of the possible jobs. Then it must realize the best fitting ability to the possible positions considering the cultural aspects. Testings and interviews must be carefully planned and done as described to make sure the fit between the job and individual talents. Creating a big candidate pool may bring more opportunities for a most successful selection. Application selection must be designed in a time efficient manner with the support of IT. Successful recruitment process will be over after a recruit become an employee with a good orientation program. An effective recruitment model may best resolve the recruiting complexities.
Failing to find the fitting talents, organizations will have to face severe repercussions as described in the back ground scheme. Therefore, to avoid the risks of wrong recruitments organizations may effectively use the above model (figure 1) to plan and codify their recruitment process at each stage as illustrated throughout this report. For that use of professional HR knowledge will be most crucial
As described in the methodology, provided Garry Desler’s recruitment model (figure 1) the report evaluates the organization’s recruitment process to realize each stage. At each stage, the issues to be dealt with and the important decisions to be made is described. There alternative ways and potential outcomes also reviewed. Finally recommendations were done in order to do better in the recruitment process for hiring high skilled people.
David, A., Decenzo, S., & Robbins, P. (1998). Human Resource Management (7th ed.). Singapore: Thompson Asia Private Limited.
Dessler, G. (2008). Human Resource Management (11th ed.). Prentice-Hall.
George, B., Scott, S., & Arthur, S. (2000). Managing Human Resources: New Delhi: Prentice Hall of India.
Kalemci, I. (2003). Chapter 3:Personnel Planning and Recruitment. Retrieved from http://mail.baskent.edu.tr/~20494685/Chap3.ppt
Kondo, F. (2003). Story Project Centric Organizations: The Impact on Recruitment and Retention. Retrieved March 15, 2008, from ww.icmrindia.org/casestudies/catalogue/Human%20Resource%20and%20Organization%20Behavior/HROB014.htm
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