Recruitment means to estimate the available vacancies and to make suitable arrangements for their selection and appointment. Recruitment is understood as the process of searching for and obtaining applicants for the jobs, from among whom the right people can be selected.
A formal definition states, “It is the process of finding and attracting capable applicants for the employment. The process begins when new recruits are sought and ends when their applicants are submitted. The result is a pool of applicants from which new employees are selected”. In this, the available vacancies are given wide publicity and suitable candidates are encouraged to submit applications so as to have a pool of eligible candidates for scientific selection.
In recruitment, information is collected from interested candidates. For this different source such as newspaper advertisement, employment exchanges, internal promotion, etc.are used.
In the recruitment, a pool of eligible and interested candidates is created for selection of most suitable candidates. Recruitment represents the first contact that a company makes with potential employees
According to EDWIN FLIPPO, “Recruitment is the process of searching for prospective employees and stimulating them to apply for jobs in the organization.”
Need for recruitment:
The need for recruitment may be due to the following reasons / situation:
- Vacancies due to promotions, transfer, retirement, termination, permanent disability, death and labour turnover.
- Creation of new vacancies due to the growth, expansion and diversification of business activities of an enterprise. In addition, new vacancies are possible due to job specification.
Purpose and importance of Recruitment:
- Determine the present and future requirements of the organization on 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 overqualified job applicants.
- Help reduce the probability that job applicants, once recruited and selected, will leave the organization only after a short period of time.
- Meet the organization’s legal and social obligations regarding the composition of its work force.
- Begin identifying and preparing potential job applicants who will be appropriate candidates.
- Increase organizational and 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 is a positive function in which publicity is given to the jobs available in the organization and interested candidates are encouraged to submit applications for the purpose of selection.