Recruitment And Selection

Recruitment

The process of finding people for particular jobs is recruitment or, especially in American English, hiring. Someone who has been recruited is a recruit(=AmE hire). The company employs(=hire) them and they join the company. A company may recruit employees directly or use outside recruiters, recruitment agencies or employment agencies. Outside specialists called headhunters may be used to find people for very important jobs and to persuade them(=to make someone decide to do something) to leave the organizations they already work for. Key people recruited like this are headhunted in a process of headhunting. Applying for a job Fred is an accountant, but he was fed up(=annoyed, unhappy, or bored) with his old job. He looked in the situations vacant pages(=contain job advertisements for available positions) of his local newspaper, where a local supermarket was advertising for a new accountant’s position. He applied for the job(=to request a job, usually officially) by completing an application form and sending it in. Harry is a building engineer. He’d been working for the same company for ten years, but he wanted a change. He looked at jobs with different engineering companies on a jobs website. He made an application, sending in his CV (=curriculum vitae = a document describing your education, qualifications and previous jobs, that you send to a prospective employer) and a covering letter explaining why he wanted the job and why he was the right person for it. Selection procedures Dagmar Schmidt is the head of recruitment at a German telecommunications company. She talks about the selection process, the methods that the company uses to recruit people.

We advertise in national newspapers and on the internet. We look at the backgrounds of applicants – their experience of different jobs and their educational qualifications. We invite the most interesting candidates to a group discussion. Then we have individual interviews with each candidate. The head of the department is also present. We also give the candidates written psychometric tests to assess their intelligence and personality. After this, we shortlist three or four candidates. We check their references by writing to their referees – previous employers, teachers, and so on that candidates have named in their applications. If the references are OK, we ask the candidates to come back for more interviews. Finally we offer the job to someone, and if they turn it down we have to think again. (Some applicants may get other job offers at the same time as ours.) If they accept it, we hire them. We appoint(=hire) someone only if we find the right person.

Note Situation, post and position are formal words often used in job advertisements and applications. BrE: CV; AmE: résumé or resume BrE: covering letter; AmE: cover letter Internet is sometimes written with a capital letter when it is a noun. internet (noun): mostly BrE Internet (noun): mostly AmE