Dr.

RHYTHEEMA DULLOO
Recruitment & Selection

MODULE – 5

HIRING PROCESS & HIRING DECISION

1. Nature of Hiring

1.1 Regular
Core workforce, defined as regular full- time and part - time employees of the organization, forms
the bulk of most organizations’ workforces. The key advantages of a core workforce are stability,
continuity, and predictability. The organization can depend on its core workforce and build strategic
plans based on it. Several other advantages also accrue to the organization from using a core
workforce. The regularity of the employment relationship fosters a sense of commitment and shared
purpose toward the organization’s mission. Also, the organization maintains the legal right to control
employees working in its behalf, in terms of both work process and expected results, rather than
having to divide or share that right with organizations providing a flexible workforce, such as
temporary employment agencies.
Finally, the organization can directly control how it acquires its workforce and the qualifications of
those it employs through the management of its own staffing systems. By doing so, the organization
may build not only a highly qualified workforce but also one more likely to be retained, thus lessening
pressure to continually restaff the organization.
Several disadvantages of a core workforce also exist. The implied permanence of the employment
relationship “locks in” the organization’s workforce, with a potential loss of staffing flexibility to
rapidly increase, reduce, or redeploy its workforce in response to changing market conditions and
project life cycles.
Reducing the core workforce, in particular, can be very costly in terms of severance pay packages,
low morale, and damage to the organization’s reputation as a good employer. Additionally, the labor
costs of the core workforce may be greater than that of the flexible workforce due to
(1) Higher wages, salaries, and benefits for the core workforce, and (2) the fixed nature of these labor
costs, relative to the more variable costs associated with a flexible workforce.
By using a core workforce, the organization incurs numerous legal obligations—particularly taxation
and employment law compliance—that could be fully or partially avoided through use of flexible
workforce providers, which would be the actual employer.
Finally, use of a core workforce may deprive the organization of new technical and administrative
knowledge that could be infused into it by use of flexible workers such as programmers and
consultants.
 Dr. RHYTHEEMA DULLOO
Recruitment & Selection

1.2 Temporary
Temporary employees do not have special legal stature. They are considered employees of the
temporary help agency (staffing firm) that obtained them through its own staffing process. Temporary
employees are given job assignments with other employers (clients) by the staffing firm. During these
assignments the temporary employee remains on the payroll of the staffing firm, and the client
employer simply reimburses the staffing firm for its wage and other costs. The client employer has a
severely limited right to control temporary employees that it utilizes, because they are not its
employees but employees of the staffing firm.
Use of temporary employees often raises issues of co-employment, in which the client employer and
the staffing firm share the traditional role of employer. Because both function as employers to an
extent, their obligations and liabilities under various laws need to be sorted out.

1.3 Full Time

Full-time employment is employment in which a person works a minimum number of hours defined
as such by his/her employer. Full-time employment often comes with benefits that are not typically
offered to part-time, temporary, or flexible workers, such as annual leave, sick leave, and health
insurance.
The Factories Act, 1948 in India prescribes that no adult worker shall be required or allowed to work
in a factory for more than forty-eight hours in any week and no adult worker shall be required or
allowed to work in a factory for more than nine hours in any day.

1.4 Part Time

A part-time contract is a form of employment that carries fewer hours per week than a full-time job.
They work in shifts but remain on call while off duty and during annual leave. The shifts are often
rotational. Workers are considered to be part-time if they commonly work fewer than 30 or 35 hours
per week.
In the US, the Bureau of Labor Statistics defined working part-time as working between 1 and 34
hours per week. In Canada, part-time workers are those who usually work fewer than 30 hours per
week at their main or only job.

1.5 Apprentice
Apprenticeship is an agreement between a person (an apprentice) who wants to learn a skill and an
employer who needs a skilled worker -- "earning while learning." Apprenticeship is a proven
industry-based learning system that combines on-the-job experience with technical training to
produce a certified journeyperson. Upon completion of the specified training period, apprentices
receive a Certificate of Qualification. On average, 85% of the apprentice's two to five years of training
is spent in the workplace; the rest is spent at a training institution.
 Dr. RHYTHEEMA DULLOO
Recruitment & Selection

1.6 Contractual
As part of its staffing plan, the employer may hire independent contractors. An independent contractor
is not legally considered an employee, however. Therefore, the rights and responsibilities the
employer has toward the independent contractor are different from those for its employees.
Classifying and using a person as an independent contractor frees the employer of the tax withholding,
tax payment, and benefits obligations it has for employees. It may also reduce employer exposure
under laws and regulations governing the employment relationship.
In exchange for these advantages of using independent contractors, the employer substantially loses
the right to control the contractor. In particular, while the employer can still control expected results,
the employer cannot dictate where, when, or how work is to be done. Thus, the employer loses control
over the means (work processes, tools, equipment, work schedules, and so forth) by which the work
is performed.
For example, a person is more likely to be considered an independent contractor than an employee in
the following situations:
• Working in a distinct occupation or business
• Working without supervision or oversight from the employer
• Paying one’s own business and travel expenses
• Setting one’s own work hours
• Possessing a high degree of skill
• Using one’s own tools, materials, and office
• Working on a project with a definite completion date
• Working on relatively short projects
• Being paid by the project or commission rather than by the time spent

1.7 Outsourcing
Outsourcing of work functions can be defined as the transfer of a business process to an external
organization. This is a more drastic step than simply using Independent Contractors or temporary
employees. Increasingly, organizations are outsourcing their hiring activities, meaning they use
outside organizations to recruit and select employees. Although there are variations of staffing
outsourcing, in some cases, an organization wholly cedes decision- making authority to the vendor.
Why might an organization do this? First, it may believe that the vendor can do a better job of
identifying candidates than the organization itself can do. This is particularly true for small and
midsized companies that lack a professional HR function. Second, in labor shortages, an organization
may not be able to recruit enough employees on its own, so it may supplement its recruiting or
selection efforts with those of a vendor that specializes in staffing. Finally, outsourcing may also
have advantages for legal compliance, as many vendors maintain their own procedures for tracking
compliance with equal- opportunity laws.
One form of outsourcing is when organizations outsource staffing activities. Of course, many
organizations outsource more than staffing activities—technical support, database management,
customer service, and manufacturing are common examples. A growing number of computer- chip
 Dr. RHYTHEEMA DULLOO
Recruitment & Selection

makers, such as IBM, Intel, and Motorola, contract with outside vendors to manufacture their chips;
often these companies are overseas.

2 Existing Post or New Post to be Created

The requirement is to either recruit for a new post or to refill an existing post. One has to check the
following aspects before putting the vacancy in the public domain.
I. Is the role/function still required?
II. Could the role/function be carried out by redistributing duties to other staff?
III. Could the duties be Outsourced- Cost implications?
IV. Is the Post full time or part time?
V. Does the Job Description need updating?

3 Need Analysis
There is a saying that goes as follows: “if you don’t know what you want then you are unlikely to get
it...”. This is so true in recruitment. Another expression which is very apt for this topic is: “start with the
end in mind”. This is exactly the idea behind Needs Analysis.
Need Analysis is the process of identifying and evaluating needs (see sample definitions below) in a
community or other defined population of people. The identification of needs is a process of describing
“problems” of a target population and possible solutions to these problems.
A need has been described as:
i. A gap between “what is” and “what should be.” (Witkin et al., 1995)
ii. “A gap between real and ideal that is both acknowledged by community values and potentially
amenable to change.” (Reviere, 1996, p. 5)
iii. May be different from such related concepts as wants (“something people are willing to pay for”) or
demands (“something people are willing to march for”). (McKillip, 1987)
Need analysis focuses on the future, or what should be done, rather than on what was done as is the
focus of most program evaluations. Some people use the related term “needs assessment”.
The life of a recruiter parallels that of a salesperson. Recruiters need to develop a needs analysis strategy
when recruiting sales candidates just like salespeople do when pursuing prospects. Lecturing candidates
on how wonderful the company is does not bring about excitement any more.

4 Cost Analysis
The process of developing and analyzing cost data from separate business elements and estimating
incremental and total resources needed to support current and future business strategies. A decision
making tool used to evaluate and prioritize resource needs at based on cost estimates and their expected
return on investment.
There are many different metrics that can useful for determining an accurate assessment of total cost.
For recruitment channels such as job boards or agency recruiters, employers can look to the cost-per hire
and then overlay that cost with an evaluation of long term performance and quality of hire. Additional
data points that are often used in regards to cost include the total cost per hired employee
 Dr. RHYTHEEMA DULLOO
Recruitment & Selection

across an entire company, the total compensation per employee, and the total recruitment expenditures
for every new hire across a particular time frame.

5 Job Analysis
Job analysis may be defined as the process of studying jobs in order to gather, analyze, synthesize, and
report information about job requirements. Note in this definition that job analysis is an overall
process as opposed to a specific method or technique. A job requirements job analysis seeks to identify
and describe the specific tasks, KSAOs, and job context for a particular job. This type of job analysis
is the most thoroughly developed and the most commonly used by organizations.
A second type of job analysis, competency- based, attempts to identify and describe job requirements in
the form of general KSAOs required across a range of jobs; task and work context requirements are of
little concern. Interpersonal skills, for example, might be identified as a competency for sales and
customer service jobs; leadership is a likely competency requirement for managerial jobs.
Competency- based job analysis is more recent in origin, though it has some similarities to job
requirements job analysis. The traditional way of designing a job is to identify and define its elements
and tasks precisely and then incorporate them into a job description. This task core includes virtually all
tasks associated with the job, and from it a fairly inclusive list of KSAOs will flow. Thus defined, there
are clear lines of demarcation between jobs in terms of both tasks and KSAOs, and there is little overlap
between jobs on either basis. Each job also has its own set of extrinsic and intrinsic rewards. Such job
design is marked by formal organization charts, clear and precise job descriptions and specifications,
and well- defined relationships between jobs in terms of mobility (promotion and transfer) paths. Also,
traditional jobs are very static, with little or no change occurring in tasks or KSAOs.