Section Fourstrategic in their orientation to selection and recruiting. One of
these well-performing companies, as a part of a major strategic
change, broke with its traditional human resource practices by
using a front-end strategy of combining higher selectivity with
higher salaries. It had previously placed less emphasis on hiring
quality and had used an attrition approach for eliminating
marginal employees.^24
One way in which recruiting can be more strongly linked
with strategy is to focus on those sources providing the
greatest number of desirable employees. Along this line, a
number of studies have evaluated different recruiting sources in
order to identify differences in important work-related
outcomes such as performance, turnover, attitudes, and
absenteeism. For example, one study focused on a company’s
research personnel who had bachelors, masters, or doctoral
degrees in chemistry or biology. For these types of employees,
those making recruiting contact with the company through
newspaper ads and college placement offices had lower
performance than those responding to professional
journal/convention ads or contacting the company on their own
volition. Employees who responded to newspaper ads also had
higher absenteeism rates. Further, those recruited through
college placement offices had the lowest levels of job
satisfaction. These results indicate that for research employees,
newspaper ads and college placement offices are less desirable