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Who makes the recruitment decision?

9th December 2014 Posted by

At a recent meeting with my resourcing team, we were discussing a concept of ‘on-boarding’ – a strategic process of engaging with new employees that goes beyond standard induction by providing information, training, mentoring and coaching throughout the transition.

The manager of the resourcing team was looking at making the recruitment and induction process more efficient – bringing a piece of software as a support tool. A demonstration was organised during that meeting in an effort to get me to approve our investment in this system.

After the presentation, I did give my approval to moving forward with the project, but my resourcing manager may be a little disappointed to know that what I remembered most about the demonstration was not the capabilities of the system itself, but a question asked on one of the ‘warm up’ slides: “Who makes the recruitment decision?”.

In the demonstration, the slides that followed the question offered the list of possible answers: HR, the line manager, the resourcing team … and as I answered the question in my head I fell into the trap that they had set. I said to myself “the line manager of course”, but the next slide revealed the really obvious (and correct) answer: the person who makes the decision about who joins the company is the applicant. Obvious when you think about it, but I bet this is a fact that many organisations simply overlook – I know I had.

Over the last few months, with the set up of the new resourcing team, I have asked them to work hard on improving the service to the line managers in the company and, while we had given some thought to the experience the applicant was having, there was nowhere near enough focus on this area.

I know that it has stirred some thoughts in my mind and, as a result of this ‘eureka moment’, as well as signing up to an on-boarding package, I have set up a multifunctional project team including resourcing, operational HR and training to look at how we can better welcome an employee to the company, and how we can engage with them before they even start working with us.

Kevan Sproul

Human Resources Director, SITA UK

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