Recruitment, successful and efficient at that, is a vital part of a thriving company and its effective human resource management, as it is the way to draw an essential resource, the human capital, into the organization (Barber, 1998, p.1). The human capital is formed by the people who create value, run the business, develop, learn and form a culture. The workers are those who make the company. Recruitment is the key for getting the perfect people to build up success. Successful recruitment can be attained by moving on from viewing it only as a transactional process to fill positions, and shifting to seeing it as a strategic and an essential function of the business (Zeuch, 2016, p.5). Recruitment processes can be considered to be one of the most important functions of an organization, as it can be a source of competitive advantage as the business environment evolves to be more and more competitive (Chungyalpa & Karishma, 2016, p1).
This thesis is done for a client company that wishes to develop their recruitment, its processes and get an understanding of the strong and weak points of the processes. The client company wants a clearer view of the opinions and situations of the people doing recruiting, so that they can enhance the distribution of resources, for example. This can be achieved by including a thematic interview to this study.
This study will also compare and try to find differences in recruitment between different teams, which are the product development, marketing, customer care and sales teams. Each team is represented by one worker in a management position doing recruitment for their team, and they are interviewed. Themes surrounding this thesis are recruitment, recruitment processes, practices and employer branding.
Even though there are a lot of research done on recruitment that has as well been implemented to different industries, for example manufacturing in Aher and Giri’s study “A study of Recruitment and Selection process with Special reference to manufacturing industries” (2018) but also in Mohammed and Absar’s study ”Recruitment and Selection Practices in Manufacturing Firms in Bangladesh” (2012). However, there is not extensive research comparing the recruitment and its processes between different teams. It can be expected that these differences exist as the dynamics and required skillsets, for example, of teams and jobs differ.
1.1. Research problem, questions and objectives
The research problem and research questions have come from a client company. The questions have been negotiated and agreed upon with the company to best meet their interests and needs. The company wishes to have their recruitment processes analysed to find things to enhance and find possible problems in the recruitment, so that they could be solved. Especially the possible development targets in the eyes of the company’s recruiters are of interest.
The main research question is “How to create a successful recruitment process?”. There are two sub questions that divide the main research question into smaller pieces:
1. ”What are the critical stages of the recruitment process in different teams?”
2. “What aspects of the recruitment process work well and what could be improved and how?”
This thesis aims to make the recruitment of the company more effective. The goal is to do so by analysing their recruitment processes and by surveying the opinions of recruiters, from which the possible differences between teams, for example, can be found. Once the problems have been found, they will be analysed in order to give suggestions to fix them and therefore make the recruitment more successful. Possible problems in processes that might occur, can be for example the lack of resources, such as time.
This thesis will analyse in some ways the whole recruitment process. By finding differences and weak spots, the company gets a better chance at understanding them and fixing them. The recruiters’
voices will be heard on this subject specifically, and this makes the communication between the recruiters’ and the management better.
1.2. Research methodology
This study will be done using qualitative methods. The client company will provide the author with material that can be used to analyse the company’s recruitment and its processes extensively. This will be done with the help and support of theoretical framework, previous studies, and other
literature in the matter. This way the recruitment processes will become clear and ready for closer analysis.
The company has stated frames and a thread for the recruitment and the processes, but it is still elastic, and the recruiters still have freedom in the process. This again leads to the fact that there are differences in the style of recruitment inside the company. The company’s stated frames and the practises of the recruiters will be compared.
To find and examine the differencing opinions of the recruiters, data collection will be done by holding a thematic interview for a sample of four recruiting managers. The interview will be the means to find more new information, opinions, and insights to find the good and the bad points in the recruitment. The answers will be transcribed, compared and analysed, basing the analysis on academic literature.
It is expected that the recruiters will have varying opinions, points of interest and suggestions. For example, the whole importance of recruitment, and therefore the usage of resources, might raise differing opinions. It is clear that as the teams vary in many ways, the recruitment processes are naturally shaped to meet the team’s needs. Differences will rise from the underlying fact that every recruiter is a different person, than the other, and therefore they have their own preferences. The interview questions are introduced and discussed in ”3.2. The Interview”, and can be found attached in appendixes one and two.
1.3. Theoretical framework and literature review
Bigger themes such as recruiting, its processes, management and others have been under the interest of many previous studies and other literature, such as Rozario’s et al. research on the challenges and the dominant factors in selection processes (2019A, 2019B). The literature surrounding recruitment is wide and varies a lot. The theoretical framework and literature chosen therefore has to be specified to answer best to the kind of recruitment processes the client company has, and according to the questions asked in the thematic interview.
Theories and literature that will be reviewed in this thesis are for example about the recruitment process. Process standardization will be viewed from the angle of recruitment using studies and definitions done by Münstermann and others (2008, 2010), for example. Now some of the key terms will be shortly explained down below:
Recruitment: the ways an organization sources, finds and attracts applicants, in a cost effective manner, from whom they will make selections to match a person with work (Elearn, 2009, p.1; O’Meara & Petzall, 2013, p.6).
Internal recruitment: recruitment from inside the company, from the internal labour market. In 1992 Creedy & Whitfield defined four traits for internal labour markets, that include employment stability, ports of entry, constrained wage adjustment and attachment of wages to jobs. (O’Meara & Petzall, 2013, p.76)
External recruitment: recruitment from outside of the company, from external labour markets. (O’Meara & Petzall, 2013, p.76)
Recruitment processes: The processes and functions in order to staff and recruit.
Commonly involves job analysis, manpower planning, recruitment and selection (Chungyalpa & Karishma, 2016, p.1)
Recruitment strategies: the strategies of selling and branding of the organization as an employer and the efforts to reach the best applicants (Elearn, 2009, p.1).
Process standardization: sum of a business process and an archetype process.
Homogenizing a process against an archetype process setting standards to the parts of processes and making the processes standardized. (Münstermann & Weitzel, 2008, p.8)
Selection: post recruitment phase, which includes choosing from the job candidates.
Assessing the strengths and qualities of the applicants to make the choice where the
chosen applicant will perform well in the given job. (Elearn, 2009, p.1; O’Meara &
Petzall, 2013, p.10)
1.4. Target of research (the client company) and limitations
The client company is a SaaS software company, which employs almost 300 people working with several different products. The company has approximately 170 000 customers and the products are mostly subscription based. They recruit people to work with different products and on different levels, for example they recruit students to work part-time. The company is growing and an active recruiter, which is why it is utmost important to have a working and a successful recruitment process.
Therefore, there are many people recruiting and in various teams inside the company. The teams have differences, as they touch different industries. As the teams, dynamics and jobs differ, the recruitment between the teams differs as well. For example, recruitment for coders varies from recruitment for salespeople.
As the subject for this thesis comes from a client company, and is made to meet their needs, the study will be limited to the client company in particular. The theory and literature used will be aimed to answer best to the company’s recruitment processes, and therefore the subject of recruitment will rather be more targeted, than general. However, despite the limitations, this thesis can be useful for others as well, especially if they have the same type of recruitment, or same kind of questions, to which the solutions might answer. As these limitations are acknowledged and they pave a way for future research.
1.5. Structure of the Thesis
This thesis will start with “Theory and Literature Review”, which will introduce and explain the theories and literature used in the analysing of the client company’s recruitment. They surround
themes such as recruitment processes and their performance and development, process standardization and employer branding.
Next, the research material and the methodology will be introduced. This section is divided in two:
the explanation of the recruitment processes in the case company and followed by the viewing of the questions asked in the interview. After this, the results will be looked upon and the deeper analysis of them will begin. This will include the analysis of the reasons behind the answers or problems, and the suggestions for fixing the weak points in the recruitment. Then the thesis will be concluded, and the work discussed.