What is Recruitment? Concept and Meaning
Key Takeaways:
- Origin of the Term ‘Recruitment’:
- The word “recruitment” originates from the Latin word ‘recrescere,’ meaning to grow again.
- In the 1650s, the French associated it with enlisting new soldiers, and by 1913, it included adding new supplies for student-athletes.
- Definition of Recruitment by Edwin B Flippo (1984):
- Edwin B Flippo defined recruitment as “the process of searching for prospective employees and stimulating them to apply for jobs in the organization.
- Concept and Meaning of Recruitment:
- Recruitment is an HR process involving the identification of vacancies, finding suitable candidates, attracting applications, screening, shortlisting, and selecting the right fit.
- It aims to build a company’s workforce to achieve organizational goals and objectives.
- Importance of Recruitment:
- Timely and effective recruitment is crucial to prevent the loss of time, effort, and money in case of hiring mistakes.
- The recruitment process ensures that business needs are identified, and candidates are carefully scrutinized to avoid misfits.
- The Recruitment Process Formula:
- The recruitment process involves identifying business needs and carefully scrutinizing candidates to ensure a proper fit.
- Recruitment specialists, hiring consultants, and firms contribute to this process by understanding company needs and supplying potential candidates.
- How Companies View Recruitment Today:
- Companies, both big and small, recognize the vital role of recruitment in acquiring the right talent to achieve overall goals.
- Emphasis is placed on conducting the recruitment process efficiently to get the most suitable candidates at minimal expenses and in a time-effective manner.
- Many organizations, especially smaller ones, prefer outsourcing recruitment to specialized agencies to manage costs effectively.
- Focus Areas for Organizations in Recruitment:
- Acquiring a pool of the most suitable candidates.
- Minimizing recruitment expenses.
- Achieving efficiency in the recruitment process.
- Recruitment Strategies for Different Company Sizes:
- Large companies with frequent hiring may prefer outsourcing to specialized agencies.
- Companies with recurring hiring needs may benefit from having in-house staff dedicated to understanding and planning for organizational vacancies.
Introduction
The word recruitment is common to ears if you are in a conversation with HR. Sometimes it seems like they are busy recruiting throughout their lives, and for some, that is the truth. In this blog, we will try to understand what recruitment is, its concept and meaning, and how it is perceived in big and small companies today.
Origin of The Word ‘Recruitment’
Originally, the word recruitment has its roots in the Latin word ‘recrescere’, which means to grow again.
In the 1650s, the French attested the meaning – to enlist new soldiers – to the word recruit. By 1913, it started to be specifically used to refer to adding new supplies for student-athletes.
However, in 1984, Edwin B Flippo defined recruitment as “the process of searching for prospective employees and stimulating them to apply for jobs in the organization.”
Concept and Meaning of Recruitment
“Employees are your biggest assets.”
Every organization needs employees to perform different functions. Whether it is your top management or a blue-collar worker, they all have their share of roles to fulfill. Ensuring the company hires the appropriate candidates to carry out responsibilities is crucial. But how to find suitable candidates, make them apply, and conduct the hiring process?
This is precisely what recruitment is about. Recruitment is an HR process of identifying the vacancies to fill in the organization, finding employees that seem the best fit for the vacancy, attracting them to apply for the position, analyzing these candidates, screening and shortlisting them, and finally selecting the right fit. It also includes evaluating the whole process for improvement, understanding the costs involved, and controlling it.
So in simple words, recruitment is all about building the company with respect to its workforce such that it helps to achieve organizational goals and objectives.
Why is This Important?
Imagine you hire a person for a job who leaves the organization in just a few months.
Or imagine you hire someone who is unable to perform the tasks as per expectations and turns out to be a liability for the organization.
In either case, as soon as you realize that the relationship is not fruitful, you will have to initiate the entire recruitment process and go through it all over again. It not only involves a lot of time and effort but also a large amount of money.
Also, until the company does not find the right person to carry out the required tasks, work suffers. Hence timely fulfillment of these roles is also important. Companies cannot go round and round in circles testing and trying employees.
There has to be a formula to ensure that the business needs are correctly identified and the candidates are carefully scrutinized to make sure there is no misfit. This formula is part of the recruitment process.
There are recruitment specialists, hiring consultants, and firms that have a large pool of candidates for different positions. These are dedicated to the HR function of understanding the company’s needs and supplying them with potential candidates.
How Do Companies See Recruitment Today?
Over the years, organizations, big and small, have realized the important role recruitment plays in getting the right employees who can help them to achieve their overall goals with their contribution. However, they have also realized that the recruitment process can get expensive easily. Hence, they are highly focused on conducting this process as effectively as possible. Organizations today strive for:
- Getting a pool of the most suitable candidates
- At least possible expenses
- In a time-effective manner
Unless they are large companies with frequent, ongoing hiring requirements, they will prefer outsourcing this function to specialized agencies and recruiters. This way, companies can prevent the fixed cost of employing a recruitment specialist themselves.
However, for companies with recurring hiring requirements, it is best to have in-house staff who can understand the needs of the organizations and plan to fill the vacancies in advance.
Conclusion
To conclude, recruitment is a prime function of HR, without which survival is at stake. All businesses must pay close attention to this process and make sure there is someone accountable for the success of the recruitment and hiring process.