INTRODUCTION

RECRUITMENT & SELECTION:

The vast subject of recruitment & selection is of prime importance to an organization that values the importance of getting the right skills and managing and retaining the right skills. Recruitment and selection are two of the most important functions of personnel management. Recruitment precedes selection and helps in selecting a right candidate. The role of the HR manager assumes great importance in an organization that seeks to achieve growth and progress not only in terms of profits but also in terms of achieving a better standard of work standards and ethics and employee satisfaction and greater results at work. Recruitment is a process to discover the source of manpower to meet the requirements of the staffing schedule and to employ effective measures for attracting that manpower in adequate numbers to facilitate effective selection of efficient personnel. Staffing is one basic function of management. All mangers have responsibility of staffing function by selecting the chief executive and even the foremen and supervisors have a staffing responsibility when they select the rank and file workers. However, the personnel manager and his personnel department is mainly concerned with the staffing function. After establishing the fact people are the most valuable assets for an organization, it has become even more necessary to recruit and select the right person for the right job i.e. getting the right people in post at the right time is a crucial aspect of management. All managers are likely to have to recruit at some point in their careers, some very regularly. It costs quite an amount to get a new staff members in post and train him up. It is a decision that must be made to the best of the manager's abilities. Mistake in recruiting or where posts are having high turnover of staff are very expensive for the organization. Recruitment & Selection no longer involves short term vacancy filling or the annual ritual of the campus recruitment i.e. seeking out top rankers starting them as trainees paternally overseeing their vertical progress and hence repeating the same process every year.

Now recruitment & Selection basically deals with developing a long term hiring program. Accordingly organizations are looking for people with combination of knowledge experience skills and behavior best suited to attain the organizational objectives. "An organization is not a machine but a living organism much like an individual. It can have a collective sense of identity and fundamental purpose. This is the organization equivalent of self-knowledge. A shared understanding of what we stand for, where we are going, what kind of world we want to live in and most importantly how we intend to make that world a reality". -Ikujiro Nonaka

RECRUITMENT:
Recruitment is defined as, " a process to discover the sources of manpower to meet the requirements of the staffing schedule and to employ effective measures for attracting that manpower in adequate numbers to facilitate effective selection of an efficient workforce". Recruitment as "the process of searching for prospective employees and stimulating them to apply for jobs in the organization". -Edwin B. Flippo Recruitment is a 'linking function'-joining together those with jobs to fill and those seeking jobs. It is a 'joining process' in that it tries to bring together job seekers and employer with a view to encourage the former to apply for a job with the latter.

SELECTION:
Selection can be conceptualized in terms of either choosing the fit candidates, or rejecting the unfit candidates, or combination of both. Selection involves both because it picks up the fits and rejects the unfits. In fact, in Indian context, there are more candidates who are
rejected than those who are selected in most of the selected processes. Therefore, sometimes, it is called a "selection is the process of differentiating between applicants in order to identify(and hire) those with a greater likelihood of success in a job". -Dale Yoder

DIFFERENCE BETWEEN RECRUITMENT AND SELECTION:

Flippo described in the following statement: "Recruitment is a process of searching for prospective employee and stimulating and encouraging them to apply for jobs in an organization. It is often termed positive in that it stimulates people to apply for jobs to increase the hiring ratio, i.e., the number of applicants for a job. Selection, on the other hand, tends to be negative because it rejects a good number of those who apply, leaving only the best to be hired.

PURPOSES AND IMPORTANCE:

The general purpose of recruitment is to provide a pool of potentiality qualified job candidates. Specifically, the purpose are to: Determine the present and future requirements of the organization in conjunction with its personnel-planning and job-analysis activities. Increase the pool of job candidates at minimum cost. Help increase the success rate of the selection process by reducing the number of visibly, under qualified or over qualified job applicants. Help reduce the probability that job applicants, once recruited and selected, will leave the organization only after a short period of time. Begin identifying and preparing potential job applicants who will be appropriate candidates. Induct outsiders with a new perspective to lead the company. Infuse fresh blood at all levels of the organization. Develop an organizational culture that attracts competent people to the company. Search or head hunt/head pouch people whose skills fit the company's values. Devise methodologies for assessing psychological traits. Search for talent globally and not just within the company. Designs entry pay that competes on quality but not on quantum. Anticipate and find people for positions that do not exist yet.

Increase organizational individual effectiveness in the short term and long term. Evaluate the effectiveness of various recruiting techniques and sources for all types of job applicants.

Recruitment represents the first contact that a company makes with potential employees. It is through recruitment that many individual will come to know a company, and eventually decide whether they wish to work for it. A well-planned and well- managed recruiting effort will result in high-quality applicants, whereas, a haphazard and piecemeal effort will result mediocre openings, are not interested in working for the company and do not apply. The recruitment process should inform qualified individuals about employment opportunities, create a positive image of the company, provide enough individuals about the jobs so that applicants can make comparisons with their qualifications and interests, and generate enthusiasm among the best candidates so that they will apply for the vacant positions. The negative consequences of a poor recruitment process speak volumes about its role in an organization. The failure to generate an adequate number of reasonably qualified applicants can prove costly in several ways. It can greatly complicate the selection process and may result in lowering of selection standards. The poor quality of selection means extra cost on training and supervision. Furthermore, when recruitment fails to meet the organizational needs for talent, a typical response is to raise entry-level pay scales. This can distort traditional wage and salary relationships in the organization, resulting in avoidable consequences. Thus, the effectiveness of a recruitment process can play a major role in determining the resources that must be expanded on other HR activities and their ultimate success.

SUB-SYSTEMS OF RECRUITMENT:
The recruitment process consists of the following four sub-functions: Finding out and developing the sources where the required number and kind of employees will be available. Developing suitable techniques to attract the desirable candidates. Employing the techniques to attract candidates. Stimulating as many candidates as possible and asking him to apply for jobs irrespective of the number of the candidates required.

Management has to attract more candidates in order to increase the selection ratio so that the most suitable candidate can be selected out of the total candidates available. Recruitment is positive as it aims at increasing the number of applicants and selection is somewhat negative as it selects the suitable candidates in which process, the unsuitable candidates are automatically eliminated. Though, the function of recruitment seems to be easy, a number of factors make performance of recruitment a complex one.

THEORITICAL FRAMEWORK OF RECRUITMENT:

Successful human resource planning should identify the human resource needs. Once these needs are known, some action has to be taken to meet those needs. Therefore the next step in the acquisition functions of the recruitment. This activity makes it possible to acquire the number and types of people necessary to ensure the continued operation of the organization. The ideal recruitment effort will bring in a large number of qualified applicants who is willing to take the job if it offered. It should also provide information so that unqualified applicants can self-select themselves out of the job candidacy. That is a good recruitment program should attract the qualified candidates and not attract unqualified. This dual objective will minimize the cost of processing unqualified candidates. Recruitment is defined the discovering of potential applicants or actual or anticipated organizational vacancies. In other words it is a linking activity bringing together those with jobs and those seeking jobs. Recruitment is defined as a process of discovering the sources of manpower to meet the requirements of the staffing schedule and to employ effective measures for attracting the manpower in adequate numbers to facilitate effective selection of an efficient work -force. The process of searching for prospective employees and stimulating them to apply for jobs in the organization is known as recruitment. Recruitment is a process concerned with identification of sources from where the proposal can be employed and motivated to offer them for employment. Weather and Davis defined recruitment as a process of finding and attracting capable applicants for employment. The process begins when recruiters are sought and ends when their applicants are submitted. The result is a pool of applicants from which new employees are selected. Lord has defined Recruitment in terms of competitive nature. He views that recruitment is a form of competition. Just as corporations compete to develop, manufacture and market the best product or service, they must

also compete to identify, attract and hire the qualified people. Recruitment is a big business.