Recruitment, selection and training

In one paragraph

How a business finds people and gets them useful. The internal-or-external choice has consequences well beyond the vacancy.

Internal recruitment — promoting or moving someone already employed. Cheaper, faster, lower risk because you know them, and motivating because it shows progression exists. It leaves a vacancy elsewhere and brings in no new thinking.

External recruitment — hiring from outside. Brings new skills and perspective and a wider field. Costs more, takes longer, carries more risk, and can demotivate people who wanted the job.

The usual documents are a job description (what the role involves) and a person specification (what the person needs to be able to do).

Training

Induction — settling a new starter in. On-the-job — learning while doing, cheap and immediately relevant, and it transmits bad habits as readily as good ones. Off-the-job — courses and qualifications away from the workplace, broader and more expensive, and it makes the person more attractive to other employers.

The objection that trained people leave is real. The alternative — untrained people who stay — is worse.

How to actually use it

• Write the person specification before you see any applications. It is the only defence against hiring the most confident person in the room.
• Cost a bad hire honestly — recruitment, salary, lost output, the disruption and the second recruitment. It reliably exceeds the cost of taking longer.

Where it breaks down

• Interviews are weak predictors of performance on their own. Work samples and structured questions asked identically of everyone do considerably better.

If you are being examined on it

Recommend one route and justify it from the case — the skills needed, the cost, the effect on existing staff.

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