Meaning and Definition of Recruitment

Once an organisation has estimated how many people it needs and of what kind — the earlier step in the staffing process — the next task is to actually build a pool of candidates from which those vacancies can eventually be filled. This is the job of recruitment.

Recruitment is the process of searching for and attracting a pool of capable, suitable candidates and encouraging them to apply for jobs in an organisation. In other words, recruitment is a positive process — it is concerned with generating applications, widening the field of choice, and making a vacancy known to as many suitable people as possible.

A commonly quoted definition (Edwin B. Flippo) describes recruitment as "the process of searching for prospective employees and stimulating them to apply for jobs in the organisation." The key words here are searching and stimulating — recruitment does not stop at merely announcing that a vacancy exists; it actively works to attract the right people to apply for it.

Recruitment is not the same as selection, and this distinction is central to this chapter and the one that follows it:

• Recruitment is a positive process — it tries to attract the maximum number of suitable candidates so that management has a wide pool to choose from. Its output is a pool of applications.
• Selection (covered in detail in the next chapter) is a negative, screening process — it involves rejecting unsuitable candidates from among those who applied, so that only the best-fit candidate(s) remain. Its output is one or a few hired employees.

Recruitment therefore comes before selection in the staffing process, and the quality of the final hire depends heavily on how well recruitment did its job — a narrow or poorly-attracted pool of applicants leaves selection with very little genuine choice, no matter how rigorous the selection process itself is. This chapter deals only with how an organisation attracts candidates; how it then chooses among them is the separate subject of the next chapter.