Purpose of Recruiting

The purpose of recruitment is to generate and maintain the interest of desirable potential employees. An organization’s recruitment messages, how it handles its recruiting process, and the behaviors of its recruiters can all influence its current and future hiring effectiveness and have spillover effects as well. Treating potential applicants and employees as potential customers can enhance organizational hiring success as well as organizational performance.

The question of who should recruit for a particular position is not one to be taken lightly as the choice affects the speed and quality of the staffing initiative. The first decision an organization needs to make with regard to who should recruit is whether the recruiter should be internal or the organization should outsource its recruiting activities and use external recruiters. The fact that internal recruiters generally do more hiring for an organization than do external recruiters can also mean that more information is available to the organization on each recruiter’s strengths and limitations. This knowledge can be used in making recruiting assignments and identify training and development opportunities that can improve internal recruiters’ effectiveness over time. Because all the recruiting metrics can be collected and processed centrally, using internal recruiters can also facilitate recruitment evaluation.

As discussed earlier, the recruitment information communicated by the organization and its recruiters must be per- ceived as credible if it is to influence applicant attraction. Perhaps ensuring the credibility of the recruiting information received is why applicants have been found to generally prefer meeting with multiple organizational representatives during the recruitment process.127 Some research has found that applicants perceive job incumbents to be more likeable, knowledgeable, and trustworthy sources of job information than formal recruiters. Applicants also report themselves