Informal Recruitment Research Articles

Recruiting personnel in a tight labour market: an analysis of employers' behaviour

PurposeDuring recent years, the Dutch labour market has developed from a buyers' market into a sellers' market. Consequently employers had to increase their efforts to find suitable staff. This paper aims to analyse the instruments employers use to contact with potential workers. To what extent do employers still rely on traditional means like advertisements in the paper or do they behave more actively, using the world wide web, visiting job fares et cetera.Design/methodology/approachThe authors conducted a survey among more than 1,000 employers in The Netherlands. Factor analyses and regression analyses are carried out to explain different recruitment strategies.FindingsThe factor analyses show that the different recruitment methods can be traced back to three recruitment strategies. The first strategy was described as active and informal recruitment. The second strategy was called recruiting via the internet and the third is characterised by formal recruitment. The results suggest that many organisations – not in the least organisations in the local government sector – could gain a great deal from using a wider range of instruments to recruit new personnel.Originality/valueThe paper analyses the instruments used by employers in search for potential workers.

CREATING EQUALITY IN THE CONSTRUCTION INDUSTRY: AN AGENDA FOR CHANGE FOR WOMEN AND ETHNIC MINORITIES

Within the UK, construction has an unenviable status as being the industry with the lowest representation of women and ethnic minority employees. Despite considerable efforts to diversify the industry's labor force, this has had little tangible effect on the numbers of these non-traditional entrants. Empirical studies that have explored aspects of women's and ethnic minorities' employment have tended to deal with the experiences of these under-represented groups separately. In contrast, this paper uses the findings from two research studies to compare women and ethnic minority employees' experiences of gaining employment and working within the industry. Both studies suggest the construction workplace presents a challenging and hostile environment for non-traditional entrants, and women and ethnic minority employees face both similar and different challenges and attitudinal barriers. Discriminatory behavior perpetrated by the dominant white male workforce is commonplace, as are informal recruitment practices, exclusive networks and a competitive and adversarial culture. By comparing and analyzing the results and recommendations from the two studies, the paper identifies where action is required to lead to a more balanced and socially representative workforce in the future. The similarity of the recommendations put forward by these studies suggests that there would be an advantage in developing a more holistic approach towards managing diversity in the sector. It is argued that addressing a broad range of equal opportunities in an integrated and strategic manner would enhance opportunities for women, ethnic minorities, and for the workforce as a whole.

Affective and continuance commitment to the organization: test of an integrated model in the Turkish context

The present study investigated organizational commitment in Turkey, a predominantly collectivist society. A model of antecedents and consequences of organizational commitment was tested, where commitment was conceptualized as composed of two dimensions, affective and continuance. Affective commitment was hypothesized to develop from positive work experiences and to predict desirable outcomes. Continuance commitment, on the other hand, was argued to be culture-bound. In line with Becker (Am. J. Sociol. 66 (1960) 32), it was proposed that in a collectivist culture like Turkey, the normative nature of the employment relationship would generate expectations for loyalty to the organization, and the perceived costs of violating these expectations would be reflected in increased continuance commitment. In particular, it was expected that the endorsement of generalized norms for loyalty to one's organization and informal recruitment would lead to higher levels of continuance commitment. The investigation involved two phases. In Study I, in-depth interviews were conducted with Turkish employees to develop emic items for the scales of interest. In Study II, the proposed model was tested using structural equations modeling. The results not only confirmed the cross-cultural generalizability of the antecedents and consequences of affective commitment, but also indicated that loyalty norms and ingroup approval increased continuance commitment. The influence of norms and the ingroup was stronger for allocentrics. Furthermore, for allocentrics, continuance commitment was related to more positive job outcomes. The results underline the importance of normative concerns in understanding employee attachment in collectivist contexts and also point to a need for a better measurement of calculative commitment.

Women in Television in the Multi-Channel Age

This article explores the impact of structural and technological change on women's employment in the UK television industry. It looks at the challenges faced by women in working in what has become since the mid-1980s a largely freelance industry where short-term contracts, informal recruitment procedures and long, unpredictable work schedules mean that women find it increasingly difficult to combine a career and family. Through case studies of individual careers, of a women's magazine programme for S4C Digital and a survey of women's credits on a selection of the newer channels (Sky One, UK Living and Channel 5), it argues that technological advances in digital transmission and production will not improve working conditions and opportunities for women's participation in all areas of the industry if they continue to replicate existing practice.

Recruitment in small firms

The article summarises findings from recent case study research into recruitment in small firms. The research aims to ascertain whether small firms follow the procedures outlined in the prescriptive literature on recruitment, and to what extent they rely on informal recruitment methods. It finds little evidence of the adoption of the recommended systematic procedures and a high use of “tried and trusted” methods including word‐of‐mouth recruitment and the hiring of “known quantities”. The implications of this are examined. While these methods have certain advantages, they may also give rise to a number of problems. The study argues that the adoption of more formal procedures and methods could reduce staff turnover in small firms and its associated costs. However, it concludes that many small employers would remain unconvinced by the case for opening up recruitment channels, and may find their existing approaches more cost effective in the short term.

At the margins: Women workers in the Bengal jute industry

This paper seeks to raise questions about Indian women's low participation in modern factory industries on the basis of an examination of the case of the jute industry in Bengal. The focus of the paper is on the colonial period, but some of the patterns evolved in that period are shown to be highly resilient or to have been reinforced in the period after Independence. The colonial state, it is argued, helped to achieve and foster a particular accommodation between capitalist and patriarchal forces which allowed the retention of women's labour in the non-capitalist and household sectors or at the lower end of the wage labour market. The more lucrative jobs in the mills increasingly became the prerogative of men, who through their ability to command women's labour and mobility, provided the flexible labour that jute mill entrepreneurs desired. The mills in their turn further casualised the labour market through irregular hiring and personalised and informal recruitment. The mills—and the city itself—were a predominantly male world. Poor urban women who lived and worked in this environment were confronted with frequent sexual harassment and the stigma of being seen as sexually immoral. In addition, the difference between male and female earnings widened as women became concentrated in 'unskilled' jobs. As wage conditions improved and mill workers aspired towards upward social mobility, there were strong pressures towards the domestication of working-class women.

Promoting the recruitment and retention of minority faculty

The need for proactive recruitment programs, I believe, will be even more essential as faculty-ALL faculty-become more difficult to identify, as private practice and other professional options continue to be more available and attractive and as student debt levels continue to rise. Active retention programs for new faculty will also be critical activities for departments and colleges of dentistry. Several factors threaten the longevity of junior faculty: As dentistry schools are required to become more financially self-reliant with less support from the parent university (and/or the state), faculty will be asked to "produce" more (and the trend toward clinic track appointments is not likely to mitigate this problem). The standards and rigor of the promotion process at many universities are continually increasing. The increased teaching loads required by our seemingly inexorably increasing curricula are not supported by a commensurate increase in the number of faculty. Lastly, the need for a more diverse faculty intensifies these pressures on many new appointees. Therefore, in my view, we can no longer afford to rely on our largely informal recruitment and retention networks of the past. We must develop programs to support and monitor the transition of new faculty into our university culture.

LABOR RECRUITMENT AND THE LURE OF THE CAPITAL:

This case study of Central American migration to Washington, DC closely examines how gender is related to the decision to migrate, as well as the choice of destination. The study investigates the social and economic conditions in sending Central American countries as well as those in a receiving city in the United States to determine why women predominate in certain labor migrations. A macrostructural analysis accounts for the conditions that delimit the flow of international migrants, but a concept termed gendered labor recruitment provides the link between macro- and microlevels of analysis. Results of the research indicate that approximately seventy percent of the initial Central American migrants to the nation's capital in the 1960s and 1970s were women and that their migration may be attributed partly to informal labor recruitment. Over the years, Washington's government, diplomatic and professional workforce “recruited,” made arrangements for, or returned to the nation's capital with foreign workers who could provide basic services, primarily as domestics and child-care providers.

Affirmative Action and Impact Theory

Abstract This study examines the employee search activities conducted by personnel workers in a large multistate banking institution in 1988 (N = 573). The findings support aspects of Wasby's social impact theory and Lipsky's contentions on “street-level bureaucracies.” Here personnel employees act at substantial variance with legal prescriptions as a means of coping with limited resources, job demands and social pressures. Personnel voice a clear preference for time and cost effective informal recruitment strategies (ie., referral hires). However, the magnitude of informal recruitment is obscured from public scrutiny since personnel workers have the discretion to record referral hires as walk-ins. The findings suggest that lower level participants continue to engage in practices, often neutral in terms of intent, that operate to “freeze” existing inequalities.

Informal Practices, Flexible Firms and Private Labour Markets

Interest in informal recruitment methods, and workers' informal job search and acquisition methods, has increased since the recession began. Although evidence (for example, the General Household Survey) does not suggest that the recession has led to a general increase in employers' use of informal methods, significant advances have been made in the theory of informal practices. These ideas are tested against some new evidence from South Wales, and the results are incorporated into a simple model of informal practices which introduces the idea of a `private labour market'. The model suggests that some `recruitment' methods are best seen as contingent and sometimes as the absence of recruitment methods. Finally, the importance of the various stimuli to change in informal practices is considered in the light of the GHS and South Wales evidence.