Meaning and Definition of Selection

Recruitment, covered in the previous chapter, does the work of building up a pool of applicants — advertising a vacancy, inviting applications, and generating as large and as suitable a set of candidates as possible. Once that pool exists, the organisation faces a very different task: deciding exactly WHO, out of everyone who applied, should actually be hired. That task is selection.

Selection may be defined as the process of choosing the most suitable candidate(s) for a vacant post from among all the applicants generated through recruitment, by systematically screening out those who are found unsuitable at each stage, until the required number of the best-fit candidates remain. Selection is essentially a matching exercise — matching the requirements of a job (the qualifications, skills, experience and personal qualities it demands) against the qualifications, skills, experience and personal qualities that each applicant actually possesses.

Selection is a negative process, while recruitment is a positive process. This is the single most important distinction to fix in mind before studying the steps that follow:

• Recruitment is positive because its whole purpose is to ATTRACT — to maximise the number of suitable applicants who come forward for a vacancy, casting as wide and inviting a net as possible.
• Selection is negative because its whole purpose is to ELIMINATE — starting from the full pool that recruitment has generated, unsuitable candidates are progressively rejected at successive stages (screening, tests, interviews, checks) until only the candidate(s) who best fit the job are left standing.

Because selection follows directly on from recruitment, the two are often studied together as parts of a single staffing sequence — recruitment first builds the pool, and selection then narrows it down — but they remain conceptually and procedurally distinct activities, each with its own techniques and its own objective. This chapter deals strictly with the SELECTION side of that sequence: how an organisation chooses the right person from the applicants recruitment has already produced. What happens after a person is selected and placed — namely, training them for the job — is the subject of the next chapter, not this one.