Recruitment and Selection: The Process of Hiring Employees

The critical role that the recruitment and selection process plays in an organization's operational management activities can spur, derail, or stagnate business growth and development depending on how it is handled. The highest standards of honesty, integrity, and professionalism are business virtues that establish highly successful and competitive organizations' corporate culture on how they handle their recruitment and selection process (Armstrong, 2006). The cost-effectiveness and implications of the recruitment and selection process are determinants of the undertaking's overall success. The recruitment and selection process defines the job requirements, such as the job specification and description, and stipulates the terms and conditions. The process also attracts candidates through job advertisements or through outsourcing the services of consultants and agencies. It also selects candidates by competitively picking the most suitable persons for the job and preparing the employment contract. Electronic recruitment has gained more prominence and preference in the current digital world than conventional recruitment and selection compared to the norm in the organization environment. In the current global health pandemic, e-recruitment makes more sense. It reduces the physical contact between the panel and the prospective candidates, hence breaking the deadly coronavirus's transmission chain. E-recruitment is cheaper and more effective than the conventional method, making it an attractive avenue to have competitive employees that suit the organizational needs (Armstrong, 2006). The ease of efficiency and thorough scrutiny and employee selection that the e-recruitment guarantees are essential in unearthing deeper issues about the prospective candidates. Such would not be easy to establish in the conventional recruitment process. 

To improve the recruitment and selection process, managers would employ new approaches to discovering talents, creativity, and innovation in the prospective candidates and consider how these abilities would help accomplish the organizational goals and objectives. The managers can also enhance the recruitment and selection process's efficiency by using human resource sourcing tools and software. This would help eliminate human bias and hence streamline the competitive organizational edge in the kind of professionals they hire (Armstrong, 2006). Collecting and analyzing feedback from the candidates is an undertaking that managers can perform to help them realize the gaps in their selection and recruitment process. Acting on relevant feedback to fill the gaps enhances the organizational, and operational management activities as these gaps may, for instance, be adding additional and unnecessary costs on recruitment and selections hence improving cost efficiency. The advantage of the recruitment and selection process in the global health pandemic is that it has opened new frontiers in e-recruitment where group interviews can be held through zoom meetings. This is an effective cost-cutting strategy and also streamlines the efficiency of the recruitment and selection process. The disadvantage of the recruitment and selection in the Covid-19 pandemic is that it becomes difficult to assess the prospective candidates' effectiveness through e-recruitment. It becomes challenging to assess fraudulent applicants that may not be a good fit for the job through the e-recruitment process that has been dictated by the global health pandemic (Armstrong, 2006). The conventional recruitment and selection process becomes very expensive and tedious in the worldwide health pandemic since provisions for spacing, hand washing, sanitizing, and wearing masks have to be made. Some of these costs are to be incurred by the organization. Such has led organizations to scale down or halt their recruitment and selection processes until the global health pandemic subsides or eases down. This has negative effects on the operational management activities that are in dire need of hiring new staff. 

Reference 

In Armstrong, M. (2006).  A handbook of human resource management practice. London; Philadelphia: Kogan Page.