Peter Pre­vos, 30 April 2009.

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Peter Pre­vos 2009, ‘Get­ting the employ­ees you deserve’, hypotheticorp.org, web­log post, accessed 22 Feb­ru­ary 2012, <http://hypotheticorp.org/wp/research/essays/deserve/>.

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Peter Pre­vos, (2009, April 30). Get­ting the employ­ees you deserve [blog post]. Retrieved from http://hypotheticorp.org/wp/research/essays/deserve/

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Peter Pre­vos. “Get­ting the employ­ees you deserve” hypotheticorp.org n.p., 30 Apr. 2009. Web. 22 Feb. 2012

“Man­age­ment gets the employ­ees it deserves”, Carl snarlingly uttered as he returned to his desk. Nata­sha, with whom he had shared a cubicle for longer than they cared to remem­ber, turned around. “What makes you say that? What happened?” Carl was obvi­ously still upset as he threw his hands in the air. “This new guy in Asset Man­age­ment is use­less, why do they hire people like that?” …

This situ­ation is a type of con­ver­sa­tion that can be heard in offices around the world. On what grounds do organ­isa­tions hire people and when they are hired, how do they ensure that they con­trib­ute to organ­isa­tional goals? That an organ­isa­tion gets the employ­ees it ‘deserves’ implies a causal rela­tion­ship between the actions of man­agers as rep­res­ent­at­ives of their organ­isa­tion and the per­form­ance of employ­ees. The ques­tion posed in this essay is what actions man­agers need to under­take in order to ensure that an organ­isa­tion con­sists of people it wants, that it con­sists of people that con­trib­ute pos­it­ively to the organisation’s objectives.

One of the first to research these ques­tions in a sys­tem­atic way was Fre­d­er­ick Taylor (1911). Taylor him­self cer­tainly got the employ­ees he deserved. His spartan approach, com­bined with a neg­at­ive view of labour­ers, spawned a lot of unrest and work­ers lit­er­ally threw span­ners in the works. Taylor’s con­tro­ver­sial prac­tices even became sub­ject to a con­gres­sional invest­ig­a­tion. Con­tem­por­ary Human Resource Man­age­ment has a more bal­anced view of how people can be man­aged to increase the like­li­hood that organ­isa­tional object­ives are achieved. Human Resource Man­age­ment well prac­tised can poten­tially give a “sig­ni­fic­ant advant­age over com­pet­it­ors” (de Cieri et al. 2008: 48).

The import­ance of select­ing and retain­ing suit­able people is even more import­ant in an eco­nomic reces­sion. Brown (2008: 17) wrote in this con­text that it is “hard to recruit and retain good staff. If [dur­ing the reces­sion] you let them go, it could ’make or break’ a company’s repu­ta­tion”. In this essay, the ways in which an organ­isa­tion can recruit, select, motiv­ate and retain the staff it needs, rather than the staff it ‘deserves’ are explored. In the first sec­tion, the import­ance of recruit­ment and selec­tion is dis­cussed. The second sec­tion provides a curs­ory over­view of per­form­ance man­age­ment. It will be argued that organ­isa­tions indeed “get the employ­ees they deserve” because the extent to which employ­ees con­trib­ute to organ­isa­tional object­ives is dir­ectly related to the qual­ity of the effort inves­ted by an organ­isa­tion to recruit, select and motiv­ate staff.

Recruit­ment and selec­tion are the prac­tices of an organ­isa­tion by which it iden­ti­fies and attracts people con­sidered to be able to con­trib­ute to the achieve­ment of the organisation’s object­ives. The recruit­ment pro­cess is aimed at com­mu­nic­at­ing the exist­ence of a vacancy to those seg­ments of the job mar­ket that an organ­isa­tion seeks to recruit from. In the selec­tion pro­cess, appro­pri­ate mech­an­isms are used to choose the can­did­ate that is most likely to con­trib­ute to the organisation’s object­ives (de Cieri et al. 2008). The recruit­ment pro­cess is influ­enced by sev­eral factors. The main object­ive of Recruit­ment and Selec­tion is to increase the like­li­hood of a match between applic­ant and vacancy char­ac­ter­ist­ics, or ‘job fit’. Job fit is bid­irec­tional as the vacancy char­ac­ter­ist­ics need to fit the applic­ant char­ac­ter­ist­ics and vice versa. Only if the fit is bid­irec­tional will the  incum­bent be in the best pos­sible pos­i­tion to con­trib­ute pos­it­ively to the organ­isa­tion. This is achieved by con­trolling the three influ­en­cing factors. Human resource policies affect the char­ac­ter­ist­ics of the vacancy (job design). Recruit­ment sources determ­ine which seg­ment of the job mar­ket is tar­geted and thus influ­ence applic­ant char­ac­ter­ist­ics. The recruit­ers them­selves also influ­ence the job choice through their impact on both job design and applic­ant characteristics.

Factors influ­en­cing the recruit­ment pro­cess (de Cieri et al. 2008: 260).

Human resource policies are the guid­ing prin­ciples that shape how an organ­isa­tion wishes to under­take its human resource prac­tices. They are the start­ing point of all sys­tems, includ­ing work­force plan­ning prac­tices (State Ser­vices Author­ity 2007). The char­ac­ter­ist­ics of the vacancy, such as pos­i­tion object­ives, respons­ib­il­ity level and remu­ner­a­tion are determ­ined in the work­force plan­ning process.

Tra­di­tion­ally, recruit­ment and selec­tion is aimed at find­ing an applic­ant that matches the job require­ments. Some organ­isa­tions use a jux­ta­posed approach by design­ing a job to suit a can­did­ate (Fox 2000). Lee (1994) and Mackin­lay (1993) advoc­ate a mutual adapt­ab­il­ity between the organ­isa­tion and the can­did­ate to ensure the best pos­sible ‘job fit’. From this it can be con­cluded that Human Resource policies need to be flex­ible to allow the recruit­ers to achieve the best outcome.

The source of recruit­ment influ­ences applic­ant char­ac­ter­ist­ics because each source istar­geted towards a cer­tain seg­ment of the job mar­ket. Research by Breaugh (1981: 145) showed that the source of recruit­ment is  “strongly related to sub­sequent job per­form­ance, absent­ee­ism and work atti­tudes”. Breaugh (1981: 145) showed that people placed through uni­ver­sit­ies and to a lesser extent those sourced through news­pa­pers, were “inferior in per­form­ance” to applic­ants who were sourced through advert­ise­ments in pro­fes­sional pub­lic­a­tions. People recruited through news­pa­per advert­ise­ment missed almost twice as many days as those recruited through other sources, such as employee refer­rals (Breaugh 1981).However, Wooden and Hard­ing (1998) repor­ted that the most pop­u­lar and most suc­cess­ful recruit­ment source in Aus­tralian private industry, as meas­ured by the num­ber of filled vacan­cies, are news­pa­per advert­ise­ments. One pos­sible explan­a­tion of this phe­nomenon is the Indi­vidual Dif­fer­ence Hypo­thesis in which it is stated that recruit­ment sources dif­fer in the types (edu­ca­tion, class, self-image and so on) of applic­ants they reach, which will res­ult in dif­fer­ent out­comes. Fol­low­ing this hypo­thesis, people recruited through employee refer­rals may be more cap­able than  indi­vidu­als recruited from pub­lic sources because cur­rent employ­ees will screen poten­tial applic­ants before they con­sider them for a pos­i­tion in the organ­isa­tion as their own repu­ta­tion is at stake (Breaugh and Starke 2000).

Recent research has shown that man­agers in Hanoi prefer informal net­works, such as fam­ily mem­bers of exist­ing staff, as a source of recruit­ment (Wat­son and Pre­vos 2009). Viet­namese man­agers per­ceive hir­ing from the exten­ded net­work of staff to achieve bet­ter organ­isa­tional com­mit­ment. The effect­ive­ness of informal net­works as a prime recruit­ment source is evid­enced by the ori­ginal research by Breaugh (1981) and would seem to sup­port the Indi­vidual Dif­fer­ence Hypo­thesis. Recruit­ers influ­ence vacancy char­ac­ter­ist­ics because they are often involved in the design of the jobs to be recruited. The psy­cho­lo­gical traits of a recruiter also influ­ence applic­ant char­ac­ter­ist­ics. De Cieri et al (2008) identify ‘warmth’ and ‘inform­at­ive­ness’ as import­ant aspects. In gen­eral, applic­ants respond more pos­it­ively to recruit­ers with these traits. It is a recruiter’s task to provide an atmo­sphere in which applic­ants are able to fully explore their suit­ab­il­ity. Many people are nervous in an inter­view situ­ation and the recruiter some­times needs to help the applic­ant by ensur­ing the require­ments of the pos­i­tion are clearly communicated.

The recruiter also pass­ively influ­ences applic­ant char­ac­ter­ist­ics because they inter­pret inform­a­tion provided by the applic­ant and determ­ine to what extent they match the vacancy require­ments. From a philo­soph­ical per­spect­ive, the recruit­ment pro­cess involves a her­men­eutic in which the applic­ant and the recruiter need to inter­pret each other’s expect­a­tions by pro­cessing the inform­a­tion provided. The fact that the recruit­ment pro­cess is under­taken in a power imbal­ance (Heap 2008) adds an addi­tional layer of com­plex­ity because both parties are rarely pre­pared to be fully open to each other, which requires spe­cial com­mu­nic­a­tion and  inter­pret­a­tion skills of the recruiter.

Many selec­tion meth­ods such as inter­views, psy­cho­met­ric test­ing, phys­ical abil­ity tests and situ­ational exer­cises, are at the dis­posal of recruit­ers. There are five main issues to be con­sidered regard­ing these meth­ods (de Cieri et al. 2008). The meas­ures used to determ­ine the best can­did­ate need to be con­sist­ent and reli­able and as much as pos­sible free from ran­dom error. Secondly, the out­comes need to be gen­er­al­is­able and free from con­tex­tual influ­ences. The use­ful­ness or util­ity of the selec­tion pro­cess is the third import­ant point. Pen­ul­tim­ately, any method used dur­ing selec­tion needs to be tested for leg­al­ity, spe­cially regard­ing pos­sible dis­crim­in­a­tion of applic­ants. Last aspect is the valid­ity of the selec­tion method, which is the extent to which a meas­ure used in selec­tion assesses all rel­ev­ant aspects of future job per­form­ance. The valid­ity of a selec­tion method is determ­ined by meas­ur­ing the cor­rel­a­tion between an applicant’s test scores and their future per­form­ance on the job (de Cieri et al. 2008). Valid­ity can, how­ever, only be determ­ined for quant­it­at­ive meth­ods, such as psy­cho­met­ric test­ing and phys­ical test­ing. Per­son­al­ity invent­ory tests are a pop­u­lar quant­it­at­ive method for per­son­nel selec­tion. An applicant’s per­son­al­ity invent­ory is con­sidered to influ­ence per­form­ance as research shows that suc­cess­ful man­agers share a large num­ber of per­son­al­ity traits. How­ever, the valid­ity of per­son­al­ity test­ing has not been gen­er­ally sup­por­ted in research. Besides issues with valid­ity, there are also legal imped­i­ments as a per­son­al­ity test can be per­ceived as an inva­sion of pri­vacy (Scrog­gins et al. 2009).

In qual­it­at­ive meth­ods, the pre­dict­ive valid­ity is much harder to meas­ure and is influ­enced by the char­ac­ter­ist­ics of the recruiter and their abil­ity to com­mu­nic­ate job expect­a­tions and inter­pret inform­a­tion provided by the can­did­ate, as dis­cussed above.

Given the issues sketched above, no recruit­ment and selec­tion pro­cess is con­sist­ently able to deliver a per­fect fit between vacancy char­ac­ter­ist­ics and applic­ant char­ac­ter­ist­ics. Also, the dynamic nature of busi­ness requires people to adapt to new situ­ations not fore­seen dur­ing the recruit­ment and selec­tion pro­cess. Thus, in the quest of hav­ing the best pos­sible employ­ees, recruit­ment and selec­tion are only the first step. After new staff have been hired, ongo­ing per­form­ance man­age­ment, which can be defined as the “pro­cess through which man­agers ensure that the activ­it­ies and out­puts of employ­ees are con­gru­ent with the object­ives of the organ­isa­tion” (de Cieri et al. 2008: 343), is required. The object­ive of per­form­ance man­age­ment is to motiv­ate staff to con­sist­ently under­take their daily tasks with intens­ity, per­sist­ence and effort (Rob­bins and Judge 2007).

A pleth­ora of motiv­a­tion the­or­ies has been pro­posed over the past dec­ades. One of the most widely accep­ted mod­els is Vic­tor Vroom’s Expect­ancy The­ory. Accord­ing to Vroom, the “strength of a tend­ency to act in a cer­tain way depends on the strength of an expect­a­tion that he act will be fol­lowed by an out­come and on the attract­ive­ness of that out­come” (Rob­bins and Judge 2007: 208). Vroom’s model uses three con­cepts to explain motivation.

Expect­ancy The­ory (Rob­bins and Judge 2007: 208).

1. Expect­ancy: the like­li­hood, as per­ceived by the indi­vidual, that exert­ing a given amount of effort will lead to performance.
2. Instru­ment­al­ity: the degree to which the indi­vidual is con­vinced that per­form­ing at a cer­tain level will lead to a desired outcome.
3. Val­ance: the degree to which organ­isa­tional rewards match an individual’s per­sonal goals.

The basic util­ity of Expect­ancy The­ory is that in order to enhance per­form­ance of indi­vidu­als, man­agers should link rewards to per­form­ance and that these rewards are deserved and wanted by employ­ees. An employ­ment rela­tion­ship is under­pinned by prin­ciples of mutu­al­ity and reci­pro­city (Heap 2008) in that employ­ees expect a return for their efforts, as out­lined in Expect­ancy The­ory. A return can be provided to employ­ees on three levels.  A primary employ­ment con­di­tion is the remu­ner­a­tion employ­ees receive in return for their labour. Many sys­tems have been developed to shape remu­ner­a­tion in order to motiv­ate employ­ees to behave in a cer­tain man­ner. How­ever, research under­taken by Hertzberg has led him to con­clude that money is a lim­ited means of motiv­at­ing staff. He clas­si­fied salary as a Hygiene Factor, rather than a Motiv­ator, which means that remu­ner­a­tion keeps people from being dis­sat­is­fied, but only has lim­ited util­ity in motiv­at­ing staff to improve per­form­ance (Rob­bins and Judge 2007). Sec­ond­ary employ­ment con­di­tions, such as annual leave are also con­sidered Hygiene Factors, spe­cially in coun­tries where these are con­sidered basic enti­tle­ments. The ter­tiary level of employee rewards relates to those aspects of the employ­ment rela­tion­ship that are usu­ally not con­trolled through a formal agree­ment. They can be social bene­fits, work con­di­tions or more eph­em­eral aspects of a work­ing rela­tion­ship such as a sense of achieve­ment or recog­ni­tion. An example of a com­pany that uses ter­tiary bene­fits to motiv­ate and retain staff is Google. Their offices are known for their informal atmo­sphere, includ­ing many oppor­tun­it­ies to relax and play games (de Cieri et al. 2008).

Provid­ing bet­ter ‘tools of the trade’ can also be a means to motiv­ate staff and improve per­form­ance. One example is know­ledge man­age­ment which, besides hav­ing the abil­ity to cre­ate a com­pet­it­ive advant­age through the cre­ation of intel­lec­tual prop­erty, also assist indi­vidu­als to per­form bet­ter because “effect­ive know­ledge man­age­ment sys­tems may relieve indi­vidu­als of the bur­den of ‘rein­vent­ing the wheel,’ free­ing them to engage in more cre­at­ive tasks” (Child and Shumate 2007: 30). Research by Child and Shumate (2007) lead them to con­clude that know­ledge man­age­ment that is based on tacit know­ledge held by indi­vidu­als, rather than mov­ing that know­ledge to repos­it­or­ies, has a pos­it­ive effect on team per­form­ance. Man­agers should focus on com­mu­nic­a­tion train­ing, rela­tion­ship build­ing and other social know­ledge man­age­ment tech­niques. This research illus­trates that oppor­tun­it­ies to motiv­ate staff and improve organ­isa­tional per­form­ance go bey­ond tra­di­tional primary and sec­ond­ary reward sys­tems. Besides recruit­ing, select­ing and man­aging the per­form­ance of staff, it is also imper­at­ive for organ­isa­tions to min­im­ise staff turnover. An employee leav­ing an organ­isa­tion can cost about two times their annual salary to replace (Eaton 2003). Many pro­fes­sional firms record staff turnover among young pro­fes­sion­als of around 25%. The most often cited cause for this is that the younger gen­er­a­tions have high expect­a­tions of their career and act­ively seek out oppor­tun­it­ies to improve their situ­ation. The younger gen­er­a­tion have a ‘whole-of-life ori­ent­a­tion’, rather than a focus on work-life bal­ance and for them work is just another aspect of their lives that has to match the rest of their exist­ence (Heath­cote 2004).

Many solu­tions have been pro­posed to max­im­ise staff reten­tion. For example, organ­isa­tions offer­ing family-friendly policies are suc­cess­ful at retain­ing employ­ees, even if indi­vidu­als did not use the policies them­selves (Eaton 2003). How­ever, “few schol­ars have demon­strated the mech­an­isms through which such policies func­tion (or do not) to enhance firm per­form­ance” (Eaton 2003: 163). Eaton (2003) also found that con­trol over work time, flex­ib­il­ity and pace of work are import­ant determ­in­ants in cre­at­ing pos­it­ive levels of com­mit­ment and pro­ductiv­ity. Other pos­sible solu­tions to retain staff are “tal­ent man­age­ment, includ­ing career cus­tom­isa­tion, work solu­tions such as chan­ging the design of an organ­isa­tion or mov­ing into vir­tual work­places; and hav­ing clear and power­ful employee value pro­pos­i­tions” (Brown 2008).

In con­clu­sion, the state­ment “Man­age­ment gets the employ­ees it deserves” is cor­rect as ‘deserving’ implies that the qual­ity of staff is related to the qual­ity of the effort an organ­isa­tion invests in Human Rescource Man­age­ment. The meth­ods and strategies dis­cussed in this essay show that an organ­isa­tion can have act­ive con­trol over the employ­ees it gets. More spe­cific­ally, an organ­isa­tion needs to be act­ively involved in devel­op­ing Human Resource policies to ensure jobs are designed to max­im­ise the like­li­hood of a good job fit.

Recruit­ing also needs to be under­taken through appro­pri­ate sources to ensure that the right seg­ment of the job mar­ket is tar­geted and recruit­ers need to be selec­ted and trained to ensure the best out­come in the recruit­ment process.

Selec­tion meth­ods also have an impact on the abil­ity of an organ­isa­tion to the find employ­ees it wants. Find­ing the right method is prob­lem­atic in light of issues with reli­ab­il­ity and valid­ity. Quant­it­at­ive meth­ods, such as per­son­al­ity test­ing, can give a false sense of valid­ity and qual­it­at­ive meth­ods suf­fer from her­men­eutic prob­lems. To mit­ig­ate these issues, recruiter train­ing and exper­i­ence are the most effect­ive means to enhance the selec­tion process.

Lastly, motiv­a­tional the­or­ies show that employee reward, spe­cially bey­ond remu­ner­a­tion can have a pos­it­ive effect on staff motiv­a­tion and per­form­ance. Organ­isa­tions need to act­ively seek out what type of reward works best with their staff and ensure that the bene­fits for high per­form­ing staff are communicated.

Ref­er­ences

Breaugh, James A. (1981) ‘Rela­tion­ship between recruit­ing sources and employee per­form­ance, absent­ee­ism, and work atti­tudes’. Academy of Man­age­ment Journal 24(1): 142–147.

Breaugh, James A. and Starke, Mary (2000) ‘Research on employee recruit­ment: So many stud­ies, so many remain­ing ques­tions’. Journal of Man­age­ment 26: 405–434.

Brown, B. (2008) ‘Real­ity bites’. Man­age­ment Today.

Child, Jef­frey and Shumate, Michelle (2007) ‘The impact of com­munal know­ledge repos­it­or­ies and people-based know­ledge man­age­ment on per­cep­tions of team effect­ive­ness’. Man­age­ment Com­mu­nic­a­tion Quarterly 21(1): 29–54.

de Cieri, Helen, Kramar, Robin, Noe, Ray­mond A., Hol­len­beck, John R., Ger­hart, Barry and Wright, Patrick M. (2008) Human Resource Man­age­ment in Aus­tralia. 3rd ed. McGraw-Hill Irwin.

Eaton, Susan (2003) ‘If you can use them: Flex­ib­il­ity policies, organ­isa­tional com­mit­ment and per­ceived per­form­ance’. Indus­trial Rela­tions 42(2): 145–167.

Fox, C. (2000) ‘Tech tal­ent: The rank truth’. Aus­tralian Fin­an­cial Review: 74.

Heap, Lisa (2008) ‘The Aus­tralian Charter of Employ­ment Rights: Set­ting the stand­ard for new legis­la­tion and good prac­tice’. Journal of Indus­trial Rela­tions 40(2): 349–353.

Heath­cote, Andrew (2004) ‘Young and rest­less’. Busi­ness Review Weekly: BRW : 26 February–17 March.

Lee, Richard (1994) ‘Recruit­ment in con­text’. Lib­rar­ian Career Devel­op­ment 2(2): 3–7.

Mackin­lay, Mar­celo (1993) ‘New strategies for a tough job mar­ket’. The Cana­dian Man­ager 18(2): 16–17.

Rob­bins, Stephen P. and Judge, Timothy A. (2007) Organ­iz­a­tional Beha­vior. 12th ed. New Jer­sey: Pear­son Pren­tice Hall.

Scrog­gins, Wes­ley A., Thomas, Steven L. and Mor­ris, Jerry A. (2009) ‘Psy­cho­lo­gical test­ing in per­son­nel selec­tion, Part III: The resur­gence of per­son­al­ity test­ing’. Pub­lic Per­son­nel Man­age­ment 38(1): 67–77.

State Ser­vices Author­ity (2007) Work­force Plan­ning Pro­cess Model.

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Wooden, Mark and Hard­ing, Don (1998) Recruit­ment prac­tices in the private sec­tor: Res­ults from a national sur­vey of employ­ers. Asia Pacific Journal of Human Resources 36(73): 73–87.