Free Essay on Human Resource Management Strategies in Recruitment for Southwood School

To compete effectively with other schools in the District and to fulfill the obligation of providing the best possible education for their students, it is critical for Southwood School to hire the best teaching fraternity into their staff. Hiring the most suitable candidates requires a superior model of recruitment, from advertisement, to conducting interviews, hiring, and promoting. One of the most effective approaches in seeking out the best talent is to increase the pool of candidates (Orlitzky 4). In this essay, we shall evaluate the strategic advantages of improving teacher recruitment procedures at Southwood School, assess some of the most pressing areas for improvement, and recommend policies for the improvement of one particular issue.

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Strategically, a heterogeneous strategy for advertising open positions at a school affects the performance of the students, the school, and the futures of both. According to research done by Collin and Han cited by Marc Orlinzky (10), recruitment practices have a long-term impact on firm reputation. It is especially important to diversify the advertising for open positions at an organization when the existing labor pool is small and the possibility of the 'best fit' candidate being found among the existing network is minimal. Suitable candidates are hard to find and harder to interview, yet they are indispensable to the good performance of an organization (Argue 18).

Southwood's system of advertising in only one newspaper significantly limits their hiring pool. Prejudices related to the paper's audience, like conservative or liberal bias, are likely to pour out into the workplace, with no other source of recruitment to neutralize the effects. Mariia Bogatova (14) maintains that different advertisement channels produce different kinds of candidates. It is important to diversify on recruitment because a diverse staff better accommodates a diverse student fraternity. A school whose staff fails to reflect the diversity of its student body is likely to have serious cultural issues that might significantly affect student development and overall performance (Gusdorf 7).

An organization that uses ineffective strategies to recruit staff will ultimately suffer poor performance. Every school has its own unique environment, a distinctive work ethic, and special management-employee relationships that ultimately lead to varied levels of success in achieving the objectives of imparting knowledge to the students (Bogatova 42). The selection methods of competitors have a bearing on the labor pool, meaning that if rival schools are to employ better recruitment strategies, they will end up with all the best teachers and ultimately outperform Southwood. Parents and students would be likely to end up moving to the other schools, meaning that the school would be failing in its duty to the society to give the best education possible to its student fraternity.

The areas recommended for improvement include the use the internet to advertise open positions, use diversified recruitment methods to hire, and improving on the material in the recruiting package. Other areas included keeping up with hiring trends, considering the possibility of try-out teaching sessions during interviews, and training the interviewing panel. It is equally important to change the recruitment policies at the school to focus more on internal promotions and only use external recruitment to hire entry-level employees and improve the scoring system to ensure objectivity. Out of these eight areas identified for improvement, we identified three areas where immediate attention is needed to mitigate. These are; diversifying on the advertising strategies, hiring based on good teaching rather than interviewing abilities and changing the HRM strategies to prioritize career progression of the staff.

The three areas were identified as being the most important because they are most likely to produce the ideal human resource body at the school. According to Maiia Bogatova (9), choosing the correct media in which to advertise job openings ensures that the institution finds the right candidate with considerable speed and ease. Identifying the ideal candidate and defining the most probable audience where he or she can be found informs the choice of media, whether it be newspapers, magazines, television, or online. Since it is virtually impossible to predict the specific medium through which the right candidate can be found (Hughes and Rog 751), diversifying the audience allows the school to widen their labor pool significantly.

Interviews, while critical to determining if a candidate is a good fit for an institution, can be deceptive. The intensive preparation is done by candidates, human error, and the short period of observation all contribute to the unreliability of interviews only as the determinants for employee suitability. Southwood School has lost several hired employees shortly after employment due to flawed hiring practices, indicating flawed hiring practices. According to Mary Argue (21), different strategies should be employed in hiring experienced teachers vis a vis inexperienced ones. For the experienced educators, referees and recommendation letters are often enough as proof of skill. The hiring school, therefore, needs to determine if the prospective teacher is compatible with their current staff, requiring compatibility interview mechanisms like informal interactions. Entry-level employees with no job experience are more delicate since the school needs to be satisfied that their teaching capabilities are up to par. Formal interviews with tough questioning as well as application forms are more important during the interviewing process because they allow the interviewers to determine the suitability of a candidate (Hughes and Rog 751).

Career progression is an important consideration making hiring decisions in any organization (Muchanje et al. 582). The most effective strategy for employee recruitment is the internal promotion and external hiring strategy stipulated by Jed DeVaro (1) whereby the tried and tested employees receive career progression opportunities while new recruits are placed in entry-level jobs. These three areas expounded above give Southwood School the best chances of success by hiring the right kind of staff.

As stated above, the recruitment strategies at Southwood School are dreadfully insufficient. From the advertisement of employment opportunities to the interviews and orientation, they lack the key tools that portend correct hiring decisions. Increasing the quality of the teacher selection process is important in attaining the objectives of having the right staff in a school. The lack of hiring strategies, lethargic implementation of policies, and poor training in hiring teams all contribute to the occurrence of bad hires that end up leaving or diminish the performance of the school because they are unsuited to the environment. Using ability tests and employing personality harmonization using MBTI personality types can give the school a degree of control on the kind of teachers that are hired and their suitability to the institution. According to Mariia Bogatova (63), personality test checks have been used extensively to make new hires in large corporations where organization culture is considered vital to commercial success. Above creating a formal scoring system for candidates, it is important to have a clear picture of the model employee and have the applicants grade themselves even before the selection process starts (Argue 19).

In conclusion, it is important to enact a more effective recruitment strategy at Southwood School because the quality of education received by the students depends on the staff the school hires to teach there. The current strategy of recruiting new teachers is deeply flawed and needs to focus more on hiring the most suitable employee for the job by widening the pool and narrowing the bottleneck through which a new teacher joins the staff. An objective scoring system allows the candidates to be part of the elimination process and gives the recruiters a better picture of their desired employee. It also enables the recruiters to identify the 'right fit' candidate for their organization.

Works Cited

Hughes, Julia C., and Rog, Evelina. "Talent management: A strategy for improving employee recruitment, retention and engagement within hospitality organizations." International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management 20.7 (2008): 743-757; DOI: 10.1108/09596110810899086

Orlitzky, Marc. "Chapter 14: Recruitment strategy." Oxford Handbook of Human Resource Management. Auckland: The University of Auckland Press, 2006

Gusdorf, Myrna L. "Recruitment and selection: Hiring the right person." Alexandria: Society for Human Resource Management, 2008

Argue, Mary. "The importance of the strategic recruitment and selection process on meeting an organization's objectives." Diss. Dublin Business School, 2015

Muchanje, Peter N., Njuguna, Felicita W., Kalai, Jeremiah M., & Bironga, Sophia M. An exploration of factors influencing career progression of tutors in public primary Teachers' Training Colleges in Kenya. Universal Journal of Educational Research 4.3 (2016): 582-588; DOI: 10.13189/ujer.2016.040316

DeVaro, Jed. "Internal hiring or external recruitment? The efficacy of internal or external hiring hinges on other policies that a firm uses simultaneously." IZA World of Labor 237 (2016): 1-10; DOI: 10.15185/izawol.237

Bogatova, Mariia. "Improving recruitment, selection, and retention of employees." Diss. South-Eastern Finland University of Applied Sciences, 2017