Oxford Handbook of Human Resource Management

(Steven Felgate) #1

organizations (see Breaugh 1992 : 12 – 13 for other examples of such questionable
assumptions). The only generalizable advice in which we can have fairly high
conWdence comes from individual-level research (not reviewed in this chapter):
recruiters that possess greater interpersonal skills and warmth seem to be an
important reason why applicants decide to accept job oVers (Barber 1998 ; Taylor
and Collins 2000 ).
Reviewers of the recruitment literature usually bemoan the fact that academic
research has had little relevance for recruiting practice (Breaugh and Starke 2000 ;
Rynes 1991 ; Rynes and Cable 2003 ). Relevance might be enhanced by more attention
to prescriptive organization-level issues and processes (Rynes and Cable 2003 ; Taylor
and Collins 2000 ), and also a cross-disciplinary widening of the research lens.
Practitioners need knowledge that is not narrowly deWned by disciplinary bound-
aries. Particularly informative for practice would be studies by research teams that
rely on cross-disciplinary and practitioner–academic dialogues (see also Rynes et al.
2001 ). This way, researchers could discern whether practitioners believe the dramatic
changes in labor markets and organizations over the last decade (Cappelli 1999 ) are
here to stay—and what important questions these changes may raise with respect to
recruitment and recruitment strategy. As mentioned before, what is regarded as one
of the most sophisticated approaches to the evaluation of recruitment strategy by
scholars, namely utility analysis (cf. Barber 1998 : 128 ), may be ignored or even
rejected by practitioners (Latham and Whyte 1994 ). The use of cross-disciplinary
research teams would most likely highlight the need for parsimony and simplicity
counterbalancing the ever increasing complexity of academic frameworks.


14.4 Conclusion
.........................................................................................................................................................................................


This review has shown the context dependence and contingent nature of recruit-
ment practices. The studies seem to suggest that whatever works for one organiza-
tion may not work for others in terms of recruitment strategy. The chapter
structure reXected the tension between possible ‘best practice’ principles (section
14. 2. 1 ) and contingency factors (section 14. 2. 2 ). As it shows, there are unlikely to be
any recruitment practices that will always ‘work’ or matter. Instead, some of the
best recruitment research has shown that the adoption of recruitment strategies
may depend on the hiring practices of otherWrms, labor market conditions, and
industry context, among other variables.
However, this conclusion about the existence of several contingency eVects (as
shown in Table 14. 2 ) may have to be qualiWed by two caveats. First, study artifacts
(e.g. sampling error) may mask generalizable eVects. Second, the mere existence of


recruitment strategy 295
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