Recruitment and Selection

A private bank needs a manager for its Lucknow branch. It can promote its best assistant manager, whom everyone knows. Or it can hire someone from a rival bank who has run a larger branch. Inside or outside is the first question of recruitment.

Recruitment draws on two kinds of source. Internal sources look inside the organisation:

External sources look outside: online recruitment, social media, recruitment agencies, job fairs, campus recruitment, headhunting, internships, walk-ins, temporary or contract hiring, poaching and government job centres. Headhunting means a search firm approaches people who are not looking for a job. Poaching means hiring people away from a competitor. A walk-in is an open interview day that anyone eligible can attend.

Back at the bank. Promoting the assistant manager is quick and rewards loyalty, but then the bank needs a new assistant manager. Hiring from the rival brings experience of a larger branch, at a higher salary and with more risk.

Don't confuse an internal source with an internal candidate. Employee referrals count as an internal method because they work through current staff. The people referred, though, usually come from outside.

Where it breaks. Neither source is better in general. Heavy internal hiring can make an organisation inward-looking. Heavy reliance on referrals can make a workforce less diverse, because people tend to refer people like themselves.

For exams. Expect to classify a source as internal or external, and to give two advantages of each.

A company advertises "Sales executive wanted" and gets 2,000 applications, almost none of them suitable. The fault lies in the steps before the advertisement, not in the advertisement itself.

Recruitment runs from recognising a staffing need to checking how well the hiring went. In short: need, analyse, attract, screen, build, evaluate. The table gives the commonly listed order. Steps 6 to 10 are ongoing activities that run alongside the others, not stages that wait for step 5.

A passive candidate is someone good who is not looking for a job, so never sees an advertisement. Employer branding is the organisation's reputation as a place to work.

Tracking in numbers (step 11). A yield ratio compares the number of candidates at one stage with the number who reach the next. An illustration: a consumer-goods firm hires sales executives in Indore.

Next year the firm needs 12 people. Working backwards with the same ratios: 12 ÷ 0.8 = 15 offers; 15 × 4 = 60 interviews; 60 × 7.5 = 450 applications. If the drive cost ₹2.4 lakh for the 8 hires, the cost per hire was ₹2,40,000 ÷ 8 = ₹30,000.

Don't confuse the job description with the job specification. The description sets out the job: its duties and responsibilities. The specification sets out the person: the qualifications, skills and experience needed. The 2,000 unsuitable applications usually trace back to a vague specification.

Where it breaks. The steps are not a strict sequence. Branding, networking and the talent pool run all the time, not once per vacancy. A large number of applications is also a poor goal in itself: every unsuitable one costs screening time.

In practice. Common measures for step 11 are time to fill a post, cost per hire, source of hire, offer acceptance rate, and quality of hire, often judged by the new person's first appraisal.

For exams. Expect the order of the first steps (vacancy, job analysis, description and specification, then advertising) and the purpose of a named step.

Need, analyse, attract, screen, build, evaluate.

A Surat textile firm opens three new units. One manager hires only people his staff recommend, one pays an agency for every post, and one takes whoever walks in. The owner sees that the firm has no plan for how it recruits.

Textbooks usually set recruitment out as five stages. They cover the same work as the eleven steps above, in broader strokes.

The strategy choices. A make or buy decision asks whether to train existing staff for the post (make) or hire people already trained (buy). Making is slower and builds loyalty; buying is faster and costs more. Recruitment can be centralised, with one HR office hiring for every unit, or decentralised, with each unit hiring for itself. Firms also fix the area to search: local, regional, national or global.

Factors that shape recruitment.

Screening in practice. Recruiters read each resume against the job specification, then hold a short phone or video call. The call checks that the person is available and communicates clearly. Common points to probe are reasons for leaving jobs, frequent moves, long gaps and no progress. These are questions to ask, not grounds to reject: a gap may be a family or health break.

Evaluation and control. Recruitment costs money in several places: recruiters' salaries, advertising and agency fees, administrative overheads, the managers' time spent on job descriptions and interviews, and the cost of the post staying empty. In the Indore illustration earlier, the ₹2.4 lakh might split as ₹1.2 lakh for recruiter salaries, ₹40,000 for advertising, ₹60,000 for agency fees and ₹20,000 for overheads. Check: 1.2 + 0.4 + 0.6 + 0.2 = 2.4 lakh.

Don't confuse policy with strategy. The policy is permanent and covers all hiring: for example, "fill senior posts from inside first". The strategy is the plan for one drive: for example, "buy two trained welders from outside this quarter".

Where it breaks. A rigid policy can block a good outside candidate, and managers who ignore the policy make it useless. The five-stage and eleven-step lists differ in detail and order; where an exam question gives a list, follow its wording.

For exams. Expect the internal and external factors, the make or buy choice, the purpose of a recruitment policy, and the five stages in order.

Plan, strategise, search, screen, evaluate.

Fifty people apply for one post of assistant at a cooperative bank. Interviewing each of them for an hour would take fifty hours. Selection removes the unsuitable step by step, with the cheapest checks first.

Each step is a hurdle: a candidate who fails it goes no further. Early hurdles are cheap and remove many people. Later ones are costly and are kept for a few. The order in the line above is the one most textbooks give. Some organisations interview first, with a short screening interview, then tests, then a final interview. Onboarding (induction) comes after selection and is not a selection step.

What makes a test worth using. It must be reliable: it gives consistent results when the same person takes it again. It must also be valid: its scores predict how well people do the job. A typing-speed test is valid for a data-entry post, not for a sales post.

Don't confuse an aptitude test with an achievement test. Aptitude is potential: how well a person could learn the skill. Achievement is what the person has already learnt. Use aptitude tests for freshers and achievement tests for experienced hires.

Where it breaks. Interviews, especially unplanned ones, invite bias: a strong first impression, or liking people similar to oneself. Candidates can fake answers on personality questionnaires. A written test in English can screen out able candidates whose English is weaker, when the job does not need it.

For exams. Match each test to what it measures, and know the order of the selection steps.

Two interviewers see the same two candidates. Each asks whatever comes to mind and scores on feeling. Afterwards they cannot compare the candidates, because nobody asked them the same thing.

Interviews are classified on several bases, so one interview can be of more than one type.

An interview can also be formal (planned, with notice) or informal (casual, unplanned), and held in person, by phone or on video. An exit interview is not a selection tool: it is held when an employee leaves, to learn why.

Common interviewer errors. Interviewers are people, so errors creep in: the halo effect (one good trait colours everything), a strong first impression, the contrast effect (judging against the previous candidate, not the standard), similar-to-me bias and stereotyping. Structured questions, written scoring and independent scores from each panel member before they talk reduce these errors.

The last steps. A reference and background check verifies what the candidate claimed: qualifications, past jobs and conduct. In the final selection, the line manager or panel, with HR, chooses the candidate. A medical examination then confirms fitness for the real demands of the job. An offer or appointment letter states the post, pay and joining date. Offers are often "subject to satisfactory verification and medical", so the offer can go out before these checks are complete. Many firms keep a ranked reserve list in case the first choice declines. Placement and induction then follow, as in the staffing steps.

The selection ratio. Selection ratio is the number hired divided by the number of applicants. At a campus placement drive, 12 hired from 900 applicants gives 12 ÷ 900 = 0.013, about 1 in 75. A low ratio means the firm can be very choosy. If 5 posts draw only 6 applicants, the ratio is 5 ÷ 6 = 0.83, and the firm has little choice.

Don't confuse the selection ratio with a yield ratio. The selection ratio is one overall figure: hired against applied. A yield ratio compares one stage with the next.

Where it breaks. Reference checks can be polite and uninformative, since referees are chosen by the candidate. A stress interview can scare away able people and may tell little about real work. Medical tests must relate to the job, or they become a way to exclude people unfairly.

For exams. Expect to name a type of interview from its description, list interviewer errors, and give the order reference check, final selection, medical, offer.

A college placement cell reports that 900 students applied to one company, and the company hired 12. The 900 is the result of recruitment. The 12 is the result of selection.

The two are consecutive stages of hiring. Recruitment widens the pool; selection narrows it to the people who will be hired.

At the placement drive. Recruitment was the company's campus talk, its advertisement and its reputation, which brought 900 applications. Selection was the aptitude test, the group discussion and the interviews, which rejected 888 of them.

Don't read "negative" as "bad". Selection is called negative because it rejects far more people than it accepts. Recruitment is positive because it invites people in. Both are needed.

Where it breaks. The line between them is not sharp. Screening and shortlisting appear in both lists: as step 5 of recruitment and as the early steps of selection. In practice the same HR team often does both.

In practice. A recruiter judged only on the number of applications floods the selectors with unsuitable people. Judge recruitment by the quality of the pool, and selection by how the hires perform.

For exams. The table is a favourite: positive against negative, pool against decision, broad against narrow.

Recruitment attracts, for more candidates; selection chooses, for the best candidate.

Two more differences. Recruitment creates no contract: it only announces vacancies and invites applications. Selection ends in an offer, and once the person accepts, a contract of employment exists. Recruitment is also the cheaper stage per candidate, while selection, with its tests, interviews and checks, costs more.