Organizations may decide to allocate more resources toward marketing or product design rather than employee recruitment and selection because of the increasing emphasis on the product and brand over people or individuals. While cynical, many corporations do in fact see employees as easily replaceable and just a cog in their business plan. A good example is the US economy, wherein a large portion of the workforce could see their jobs replaced in the next 5-10 years.
Automation and technology aside, many companies often care more about selling and creating products using a consumer-based view. Apple and Nike can always hire more people because of the brand they’ve built up; everyone wants to work there. They don’t need to focus too much on recruiting the best, because a natural rise to the top will occur for them looking at results and output. Good products need to be communicated to market faster and better because more people will buy than will be hired.
By prioritizing other aspects of business, a company would benefit from better R&D and market share, continual building of their brand, or any number of factors they choose to focus on. There’ll always be bodies to work for them and they can expand and profit more elsewhere.
However, a potential weakness in not prioritizing recruitment and selection is that they do get those bad employees. Dissatisfaction is contagious and it may adversely affect productivity and disrupt other processes.
2 replies on “The Case for Recruitment & Selection”
Donovan,
I like what you said about employers thinking of employees as replaceable. I work at a manufacturing company in the HR department and I see it a lot with production positions. It is a company culture in some places to not care about employees and I think that is sad. This also just creates more work for the company too because, yes, they can find replacements but that doesn’t mean they’ll do good work either. Even when thinking about unskilled labor, it truly is in the company’s best interest to try to find they best applicant who has the best fit with the organization to save time and money.
I actually disagree with part of what you said about Nike and Apple. I agree that they don’t have to scramble to find applicants but I do think they have just as big of challenges in recruiting. These companies are so popular and receive so many applicants, I think it is still difficult for them to sift through all those applications and find the very best of them all. So they may have more to choose from but I don’t think that necessarily makes the selection process easier!
I agree that choosing the wrong employee might lead to dissatisfactions and poor job performance. Companies as large as Apple and Nike, like you said, are big enough where they don’t have to focus too much on picking the right person. I work at Starbucks right now and they try to find people that can be professional, hard working, and able to connect with others well. Employees that don’t have that personality or the will to try at their job don’t succeed there, because it’s not the easiest job. They usually quit or get few hours per week.