to the recruitment item (see table 1 in Huselid 1995 ). This makes it diYcult to discern
the separate eVect of recruitment. In addition, the meaning of the recruitment items
can often be questioned (Rynes and Cable 2003 ) because they may, in fact, be
confounded with unmeasured inXuences such as company reputation or visibility.
- 2 Organizational Contingencies of Recruitment Strategies
Based on various theoretical and practical perspectives, it would be unrealistic to
expect particular recruitment strategies to be superior to all others, regardless of
contextual inXuences. Even the most ardent proponents of ‘best practice’ models
in strategic HRM acknowledge the importance of a variety of contingency factors
(e.g. PfeVer 1998 ). Although there are no studies investigating the eVect of theWt
between recruitment and context on organizational eVectiveness (Rynes and Cable
2003 ), we can, to an admittedly limited extent, use descriptive research on organ-
izational context and recruitment to speculate about the possibly strategic impera-
tive of such context-aligned recruitment practices.^3
Recruitment (as part
of employee
motivation factor)Employee
turnoverProductivityTobin’s q
(corporate
financial
performance)Empirical evidence in Huselid (1995)No empirical evidence in Huselid (1995)−−++Fig. 14.1. Mediation effects of recruitment on organizational effectiveness
(^3) The approach covered in section 14. 2. 2 assumes that, to be eVective, company processes and
structures must be aligned with a number of contingency factors. Thus, although the contingency
approach may not be explicitly prescriptive, it implicitly is most certainly so. Generally, neoclassical
economics, contingency theory, and neo institutional theory highlight the eVectiveness of organiza
tional adaptation to organizational contexts.
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