Basics of Human Resource Management — Recruitment and Selection (Week 2)

Have you ever been through either any HR-related experiences that you find either motivational or frustrating? How do you look at a company regarding how it treats its employees? Let’s take a look at a case about Abercombie and Fitch and go through the key concepts of the Recruitment and Selection processes when hiring an employee!

Summary of the case about Abercrombie and Fitch hiring practices:

Abercrombie and Fitch, at the time of the article writer, was revolved around controversies about its discriminatory hiring practices based on outward look.

• The staff managers provided strict rules on how one should uniformly dress as the brand “model”: straight hair with natural color, meaning that dying unnatural hair colors, is forbidden; no nail polish or fake nails; no wearing black clothes; wearing brand’s flip-flops; etc.
• No diversity celebrated or respected; having a “minorities” list just to avoid lawsuits.

Key points of the case:

• Discriminatory hiring practices are very unsupported;
• The writer needed another job as a college student, and despite the brand’s discriminatory hiring policy she had to grit her teeth through the job to pay her bills; and
• She did not have a good impression of the brand HR and its HRP at all.

Key concepts of Recruitment and Selection processes:

• Labor demand is the number of workers an organization may need in the future;
• Labor supply is the availability of qualified workers with the required skills that meet the firm’s labor demand;
• HRP (human resource planning) is the process an organization uses to determine that it has the right amount and the right kind of people to use in the future
• Recruitment is the first step of the hiring process, where the HR gather a pool of qualified candidates for a particular job. The process should focus on attracting qualified candidates, both internally (from within the organization) and externally.
• Selection is the next step after recruitment, where the firm determines whether to choose a candidate for a job. There are a number of selection tools such as recommendation letters, application forms, ability tests, personality tests, drug tests, honesty tests, psychological tests, interviews, and so on. This step is very important since it determines whether the person chosen is the right one for the job performance.
• Challenges in the Hiring Process include (1) determining factors important for job performance; (2) measuring characteristics that determine performance; (3) motivation factors; and (4) who to make decisions

Conclusion

Let’s wrap up the topic for this week: Recruitment and Selection.

First, we have a case study about the Abercrombie and Fitch clothing brand as a negative example of the HRP, which might be right for the company but not right for the employees themselves. Its hiring policy and practices are against the reality — each individual is different and unique — the company did not celebrate this characteristic.

Recruitment and Selection are just the beginning steps of a hiring process; where recruitment comes first as gathering up a pool of qualified candidates for a job position, and then selection determines the “hire” or “no hire” of any candidate for that job through different tools like tests or interviews. Selection is very important as the person chosen must fit in terms of job performance.

Sources:

• https://www.huffpost.com/entry/what-it-was-really-like-working-as-an-abercrombie-model_b_7154042
• Gomez-Mejia, L.R., Balkin, D.B. and Cardy, R.L. 2016. Managing Human Resources. Global Edition 8/E. Pearson. London.