As a senior year international student, I applied for a job as a McNary student training assistant last September. In preparing this application, I checked the position details posted online, making sure that I satisfied all the minimum qualifications. Position duties and working conditions were also my focuses during browsing information about the job.
In reading the detailed position duties, it gave me an impression that is full of concern for humanity, respect for different religious beliefs and responsibility for food safety and allergens management. All of these are also views I always agreed with, which simply deepened my desire to work there.
In preparing my application materials, there were two points that attracted me to work there. First, the detailed qualification requirement established a sense of security and responsibility for me, especially for the student identity requirement and some positions’ requirement of background check. Second, as a job not that much skilled, it provided me a good chance to promote my communication skills, in responding to various customers’ demands and answering different questions. Besides, it was also a good chance for me to get to know more about eating habits in U.S., such as the most popular food, the common allergens, and also the operational solution to prevent allergens crossover.
During the interview, I learned that the working hours is flex and the final week is not compulsory, which allowed to spend more time on preparation for final exams and term papers. Taking all these factors into account, this position seem to be perfect for me as a student on campus.
The Case for Recruitment & Selection
Why might organizations decide to allocate more resources toward marketing or product design rather than using those same resources to do a really good job in employee recruitment and selection?
As what is posted in mini-lectures, organizations seek for key competitive resources, in order to conduct a positive development. For defenders valuing on recruitment & selection, human resources is one of the most crucial and inimitable factor in organizations’ success. However, other significant factors such as marketing or product design, cannot be neglected, especially for technology-driven organizations and for those focus on customer experience.
First, product design and marketing are direct drivers in profit making. While recruitment & selection contribute backstage, whose influence reveals in a comparatively longer period, product design and marketing face customers directly, and impact revenues and profitability at first hand. In order to get health cash flow and adequate investment fund at present, it is a rational choice for organizations to incline resources toward marketing and product design.
Second, as the development of artificial intelligence, repetitive jobs are being replaced by computer programs. The new task for recruitment & selection is to find the appropriate persons for those irreplaceable creativity-required jobs. In this case, the recruitment will be more refined and the number of applicants will be much smaller than before. Correspondingly, organizations are less likely to make mistakes and cause economic losses in hiring. However, product design and marketing rely heavily on creativity and innovating capacity of human beings, which naturally takes a large part of the overall resources.
What are the potential strengths and weaknesses of an organization’s decision to not prioritize recruitment and selection in favor of a focus on other aspects of the business?
- The strengths of organizations not prioritizing recruitment & selection in favor of a focus on other aspects of business.
Business priorities lead to different development patterns for organizations. Depending on the specific industry, emphases on marketing and branding may develop consumers’ brand attachment to organizations and enlarge the market share. Internet companies devote a considerable portion of efforts to improve technology and user experience. Supply chain and commercial channels are also crucial for electronic commercial companies.
Thus, different priorities allow organizations to develop their own comparative advantages. High quality recruitment & selection is an overall guarantee for the whole operation, while business decisions and priorities are the breakthrough points for the organizations among market competitions.
- The weakness of organizations not prioritizing recruitment & selection.
As talked in the mini-lecture, there are several disadvantages in not prioritizing recruitment & selection.
First, it will be a huge and expensive cost to correct wrong hiring. Besides the sunk costs in the first unsuccessful recruitment, there are still considerable labor cost and economic cost in re-recruitment for the second time. Not to mention the negative consequences brought by unqualified employees, including the poorly completed works leading to business loss, the time and opportunity cost in correcting those mistakes, and negative attitude toward work spread among colleagues.
Second, there are legal risks in inappropriate recruitment. Not paying enough attention, the hiring process may easily fall in the trap of discriminatory hiring practices, which causes unnecessary legal and economic problems, and could harm the organizations’ reputation and public relation images.
