THE PROCESS OF EMPLOYMENT

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It is an error to think that employing people starts with recruitment and selection. Any employment that starts like this almost likely fail. Before recruitment, selection and hiring decision, there are certain operations that must be carried out to ensure the success of these exercises. These certain operations are job analysis, this comprises of job description and job specification. These are what would open your eyes to what people need to do in the job and the requirements to the job satisfactorily.

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Job Analysis
According to Scarborough (2011), job analysis is the process by which a firm/organization determines the duties and nature of job to be filled and the skills and experiences required to do the job. A proper job analysis paves way for JOB DESCRIPTION and JOB SPECIFICATION. A proper job analysis ensures that people without the essential skill sets needed for the job in question are not employed. Therefore, the importance of job analysis cannot be overemphasized as it is the key to getting the right person for a job.

What is the use of Job Analysis?
Rao (2011) gave some use of job analysis, and they include

• It is used to determine when and how to recruit people for future job openings
• Job analysis will give an in-depth understanding of the requirements of the job, therefore making the hiring of the right person inevitable
• With job analysis, there can be no confusion about the job and what is required of the job, hence proper training can be done
• Risky conditions that are associated with the job is brought out by job analysis, hence the employer can correct the problems that are causing the risky conditions

Job Description:
The first step in conduction a job analysis is to develop a job description Scarborough (2011). A job description entails of what is expected of the employee, duties, responsibilities, job summary, nature, objectives, working conditions, equipment to be used, and the risks associated with a job.

Job Specification:
This is the second step in a proper job analysis. This includes the qualifications, characteristics needed for a job in the terms of skills, abilities, knowledge and education needed to perform a job.

Preparation of job descriptions and job specifications is not as easy as it seems, but it is something that must be done if the organization wants to get it right in employing people. For the job analysis to be useful to both parties (the organization and the prospective employee), practical job descriptions and specifications should be created. According to Scarborough(2011), business owners must know that what is done before recruitment and selection exercise determines to a very large extent how much right they would get it in employing the right person.

RECRUITMENT

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After a proper and successful job analysis to determine the niche of people needed for a job, the next step is recruitment. Bergman (2009) defines recruitment as the process of locating and encouraging potential applicants to apply for job openings. Another definition is that, recruitment is a process of joining those with jobs and those seeking those jobs. Cascio(2008) opined that the fact that an organization has made a job opening announcement doesn’t necessarily guarantees a desired result if those qualified for the job are not interested in the job openings.

Factors Affecting Recruitment:
Some factors that affect recruitment are:

• Nature of job advertised
• Internal employment policies of the organization
• Size of organization
• Location/environment (cultural and otherwise) of the organization
• Competency of the recruiting offices

Types of Recruitment:
The types of recruitment are internal and external

Internal Recruitment:
When recruitment is done internally, the vacancies are filled from the existing pool of workers in the organization. This is done either through promotions, upgrades, transfers, job posting/bidding, employee referral and employee enlistment. It should be noted that employee referral is not necessarily internal, as the employees of the organization refer or recommend their friends who are not working in the organization for the job openings. Employee enlistment is when the employees of the organization become the recruiters themselves, getting other people to apply for the job openings. The advantages of this type of recruitment are, resources are saved, time is saved, internal staff is likely to fit in well since the organization culture is already imbibed in the internal staff, internal recruitment can also act as a morale booster for employees as they will work hard to gain higher positions. The draw back of this recruitment are, innovation and creativity can be hampered, mediocrity and inefficiency is inevitable as promotion is based on length of service rather than merit, favoritism may be use as more skilled people may be passed over for others who are “connected”

External Recruitment:
This is done by a variety of means – campus recruitment, where the organization go to recruit promising young graduates from the university/college, advertisement on newspapers, internet, television, radio etc. Advantage of this is that the organization has a wider range of person to select from, the chances of locating a candidate with fresh skills are high, burden of favoritism is highly reduced. The drawbacks of this is the time and resource that would be used.

SELECTION:

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Selection is the process of differentiating between job applicants and those that meet the requirements for a job opening. According to Rao(2011), selection is the process of picking individuals who have relevant qualifications to fill job openings in an organization.

Three main objectives are to be achieved for a selection process to be proper:

• It should be able to predict how effectively and efficiently a candidate can do the job he is employed for
• Selection aims at identifying or diagnosing the behavior attitude and aptitude of candidate through various selection tests
• Lastly, selection seeks to discover how well the candidate can solve unforeseen problems that may arise in the course of work, how well he is able to organize or help others employees, how capable the candidate is of original thought and of taking initiative.

The recruitment is done in order that only qualified people apply for job openings. SO if done properly, everyone that makes it to the selection should be qualified. Thus, the selection process is a vey important and tasking one. However if there is a laid down procedure, the organization is bound to get it right in the selection process.

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