Evaluating the success of recruiting efforts is important. That is the primary way to find out whether efforts are cost-effective in terms of time and money spent. Essentially, an effective recruiting process is one that results in a reasonable pool of qualified employees being available to the organization and from which the organization is able to hire individuals that it wants to perform different jobs. Moreover, this recruiting process needs to be executed with relatively low cost. Thus if an organization is having a difficult time attracting people to apply for its jobs or is having too many people apply for its jobs, then its recruiting efforts are probably less than ideal. Similarly, if the recruiting expenses being incurred by the organization are excessive or higher than they should be for the kinds of employees being recruited, then the organization should look carefully at its recruiting methods to see whether efficiencies or cost savings might be justified.
The effectiveness of recruiters is one way to evaluate recruiting efforts. Organizations assign goals for recruiting different types of employees. For example, a goal for a recruiter might be to hire 350 unskilled and semiskilled employees, or 100 technicians, or 100 machinists, or 100 managerial employees per year. Then the organization can decide who are the best recruiters. They may be those who meet or exceed quotas and those whose recruits stay with the organization and are evaluated well by their superiors.
In addition, it is possible and often useful to assess the effectiveness of different recruiting sources. The process could involve simply calculating
the yield, or the number of applicants, generated by each source. In college recruiting, the organization can divide the number of job acceptances by the number of campus interviews to compute the cost per hire at each college. Then it drops from the list those campuses that are not productive. As noted thus far, general areas of concern for recruiting that should be considered by organizations include the following:
1. Quantity of applicants: Is it sufficient to fill job vacancies?
2. Quality of applicants: Do the applicants meet job specifications and can they perform the jobs?
3. EEO goals met: Is recruiting providing qualified applicants with an appropriate mix of protected- class individuals?
4. Time required to fill openings: Are openings filled quickly with qualified candidates, so that the work and productivity of the organization are not delayed by vacancies?
5. Cost per applicant hired: Is the cost for recruiting employees from any single source excessive?
In the end, organizations should evaluate their recruitment processes along with all their other HRM activities. Collecting appropriate evaluation measures on past recruiting efforts can help an organization predict the time and budget needed to fill future openings, identify the recruiting methods that yield the greatest number or the best quality of candidates, and evaluate the job performance of individual
recruiters. Benchmarking against similar organizations also can be informative.
SUMMARY
Organizational recruiting efforts should be guided by a clear recruitment philosophy and goals and keyed to the strategy and values of the organization. An organization’s recruiting philosophy and goals will influence the approach it takes in recruiting. In some cases, recruiting may not be necessary if the organization explores creative ways of dealing with labor shortages, such as outsourcing, temporaries, or employee leasing.
One of the first decisions organizations must make in filling a job vacancy is whether to seek a current employee through internal recruiting or seek a new hire from the external labor market. There are
advantages and disadvantages to internal and external recruiting. Several techniques have been discussed in this chapter. Organizations and their HRM personnel must be sensitive to changes in the market, people, and competition, and be aware of the need to be adaptive and flexible in their recruiting efforts.
If an organization chooses to recruit externally, it must plan carefully and may consider a wider variety of informal and formal methods. Some
of the methods available are employee referrals, advertising (either in print or on the Internet), using employment agencies, and campus recruiting. Special recruiting efforts targeting, for example, older people or the disabled are also important to organizations committed to recruiting a more diverse workforce. Such efforts also help the organization avoid potential equal employment problems.
Organizations should evaluate all of their recruitment efforts. They should evaluate both their recruiters and the methods used by recruiters. In this way, the organization can exclude from future recruiting efforts costly methods or those that produced few or low-quality applicants.
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