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

demand’ (Gallagher and O’Leary, 2007: 15). Anecdotal evidence suggests that UK
employers may make greater use of external consultants in undertaking R&S than is
the case in many other developed countries, indicating that they are more willing to
cede control over who is employed in their workplaces than are many of their
counterparts elsewhere.
As Kirkpatrick et al (2009) and Hoque et al (2008) discuss, a further
development has been the outsourcing of the procurement of agency staff to third
parties who provide what is termed ‘vendor managed services’ (VMS) (Kirkpatrick et
al, 2009) covering recruitment, payments to the agency, record keeping and payroll
for agency staff. The VMS does not provide the staff themselves, but manages a
market of agencies on behalf of its client.
This paper does not have the space to engage with the issues raised by R&S
outsourcing and VMS in detail, but it is plain that HR outsourcing, not least of R&S
activity, raises issues about the centrality of both staffing issues and the people
management function within organisations. VMS, as Kirkpatrick et al (2009) note,
also suggests the possibility of a commodification of labour supply and the
development of ‘mass production’ models of agency staff management. Both
developments also spark a range of questions about the different models of what an
organisation is and the nature of the employment relationships it generates.
Traditional models based around loyalty, motivation, commitment and attachment to
particular workplace cultures, norms and values appear to be coming under contest by
much more overtly financialised conceptions of the organisation as a shifting bundle
of atomised, disaggregated assets (intellectual, plant, brands, real estate, and people)
that can be leveraged and traded in manner more akin to commodities or sites on a
Monopoly board (Froud et al, 2000). Within this latter model, the only loyalty is by
senior management (the new and possibly sole constituent ‘core’ of the organisation)
to maximising short-term profit and shareholder value. This new model plainly poses
a number of major challenges for traditional education and training policies, not least
in terms of securing any serious buy-in from organisations that subscribe to this vision
to any long-term commitment to help support the government’s strategic vision for
UK skills.
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