Recruitment & Selection
| Introduction Every future graduate may be the subject of recruitment and after that selected by a foreign company. It is common that foreign companies perform that procedure in English. We are sure that the exercises below can facilitate the importance and assimilate problems related to these activities. When you have finished doing the exercises you can check how well you did in our Answers to exercises. If some words or phrases are too tough for you, you can always check the dictionary . Helpful information vacancy - If a company needs three secretaries, but has only two, then there is a vacancy for one secretary. personnel - The employees of an organisation are its personnel. recruitment - finding personnel for vacancies. staff - personnel description - picture in words. Describing yourself by giving age, colour of hair, eyes, height and weight. conditions - Stephen works from 7am to 4pm, Monday to Friday, and on one Saturday in every month he must work from 10am until 12 noon. Those are two of his conditions of work. assess - Is the applicant for the job the right age? Does he/she has the necessary education? Why does the applicant want to work for this company? specification - careful description of each necessary point profile - short description of an applicant's important points qualifications - In order to qualify for university, you must first finish high school. A high-school diploma is a qualification for entering university. experience - Experience is what you get by living through something or by working at it. references - Information about the past performance of an applicant About recruitment and selection When there is a vacancy in a company, it is the job of the Personnel Manager and his department to manage the recruitment of a new employee. One way an organisation can find staff for job vacancies is to recruit in-company. Management can inform people of new appointments by means of the firm's notice board or news bulletin. Another possibility is to ask for recommendations from departmental managers and supervisors. If it is necessary to recruit outside the company, the personnel department may use commercial and government employment offices or consultants. It may prefer to put its own advertisement in a newspaper or magazine. It is usual for an advertisement to give a short description of the job, conditions of work and salary, and to invite introductory letters from applicants. After studying these, management decides who receives an application form. In order to assess the applications, managers can work from a personnel specification such as Rodger's Seven-Point Plan. They do not choose applicants who do not have a good profile. For this reason, it is important that the application form requests clear information about such things as the applicant's age, education, qualifications and work experience. It must also ask for references from other employers or people who know the applicant well. This information helps management to make a final decision on the number of applicants they can short-list for interview. The staff who hold an interview together are called an interview 'panel'. It is important that they know what information they need to get from the applicants. This comes from a careful reading of job descriptions, personnel specifications, and applications. To held the panel in their selection, some companies use an interview assessment form. This is used by the panel during the interview when each applicant is checked under the same point on the form. Many employers say that the success of a good business begins in the Personnel Manager's office. Exercises Exercise 1 Insert the following words in the gaps in the text below: applicant, application, application form, apply, candidate, curriculum vitae, résumé, employment agencies, interview, job descriptions, job vacancies, references, short-listed Many people looking for work read the ...................................... advertised in newspapers by companies and .......................... . To reply to an advertisement is to .................................... for a job. (You become a ............................. or an .............................. .) You write an ........................ , or fill in the company's ............................. , and send it, along with your .................................. and a covering letter. You often have to give the names of two people who are prepared to write ..................... for you. If your qualifications and abilities match the ......................... , you might be ............................ , i.e. selected to attend an .............................. . Exercise 2 When employees 'give notice', i.e. inform their employer that they will be leaving the company (as soon as their contract allows), in what order do you think should the company carry out the following steps? A either hire a job agency, or advertise the vacancy B establish whether there is an internal candidate who could be promoted (or moved sideways) to the job C examine the job description for the post, to see whether it needs to be changed (or indeed, whether the post needs to be filled) D follow up the references of candidates who seem interesting E invite the short-listed candidates for an interview F make a final selection G receive applications, curricula vitae and covering letters, and make a preliminary selection (a short list) H try to discover why the person has resigned I write to all the other candidates to inform them that they have been unsuccessful Answers to exercises |