Recruitment and Selection – the Great Neglected ... - Cardiff University

generally viewed as two-fold. First, informal methods are seen as liable to lead to
various forms of discrimination (Jewson and Mason, 1986; Fevre, 1989), and second,
are deemed to be more likely to produce a poor fit between what the employer wants
and what they end up recruiting. The tendency to use informal methods seems to
occur more extensively in low- and semi-skilled occupations, which possibly aids the
perception of informal methods as less rigorous or objective. Interestingly,
economists have generally arrived at the opposite assumption in relation to informal
R&S methods, reasoning that they are liable to yield more accurate and reliable
information than more formalised methods and that they will therefore tend to be
associated with higher paying and better quality work (see Pellizzari, 2004).
Researchers in HR and economics appear blissfully unaware of this tension in their
respective disciplines’ reading of how R&S works.
Table 2: Recruitment Channels
Channel
% of workplaces using
Newspapers 65%
Employment Service 57%
Internal notices 52%
Recommendations by existing employees 45%
Word of mouth 44%
Source: Kersley et al 2006
On the first objection, there is not space here to enter into this debate in detail.
Perhaps the one point to make is that, as Brown and Hesketh (2004) note, highly
formalised R&S systems are also liable to bias, as their many elements of their
‘objective’ scoring systems for candidates are ultimately subject to the human biases
of the managers making the assessment of the candidates. On the second point, the
tendency to expect sub-optimal ‘matching’ to be an outcome of less formalised R&S
methods may well be misguided. Firstly, such practices are not solely the preserve of
small companies. For example, in the Learning and Skills Council’s (LSC) sample of
just over 200 large companies (5,000 plus staff), 30 per cent used word of mouth and
nearly 20 per cent recommendations from existing employees (LSC, 2008: 27).
Second, Lockyer and Scholarios (2004, 2007) report instances where there is a clear
underlying logic to this ‘informality’; the R&S techniques being deployed are simple,
and generate relatively robust and reliable information on the ability of candidates to
perform the job.
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