Organizational Fit
Selecting and hiring a new employee involves comparing many candidates’ skills and experience. However, the candidate with the strongest abilities and credentials is not always the best person for the job; a candidate’s personality and character traits are also very important to job success. A candidate might look great on paper, but once you meet him or her you might notice personal habits or traits and other characteristics that significantly detract from the candidate’s suitability for the job. Assessing a candidate’s organizational fit, or how well the candidate matches an organization’s work environment and dynamics, can be a useful technique in hiring new employees.
In this week’s Application, you will examine the use of organizational fit in selecting candidates to fill open job positions. You will explore the costs and benefits of this selection strategy as well as the associated legal and regulatory concerns.
To prepare for this Application Assignment:
• Review Chapter 11 in the course text and identify how HR personnel can use the information that department managers can provide to determine organizational culture and organizational fit.
• Read Chapter 13 in the course text, focusing on the legal issues interviewers must consider when asking questions and selecting candidates.
• Read the articles “Organizational Fit Is Key to Job Success” and “Performance Management for Inclusion.” How is organizational fit relevant to a candidate’s potential success with an organization? How do the principles of organizational fit relate to inclusion and diversity?
• Review the websites for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). How do government regulations affect the interviewing and selection process?
To complete this Application Assignment, write a 2- to 3-page paper analyzing the concept of organizational fit as it applies to the job interviewer and interviewee. Address the following:
• Describe two potential advantages and disadvantages to recruiting and selecting applicants based on organizational fit and organizational culture.
• Discuss scenarios in which you think this type of recruitment and selection is appropriate and/or inappropriate. Defend your position with support from the article and other resources from the Walden library.
• Comment on how you might determine the organizational fit of a candidate just from a resume and/or portfolio. Consider how a candidate’s personality could be evident in such documents. What are potential problems with making character judgments based only on a piece of paper?
• Explain how government regulations might affect the ways an interviewer could use the principle of organizational fit in the selection process.
RESOURCES:
CH 11
PARTNERSHIPS WITH HUMAN RESOURCES
Obtaining employees is an area of activity in which a department manager and HR personnel must usually work together closely. Although the process may vary somewhat from one organization to another, the following discussion represents a fairly standard recruiting relationship between HR and the other departments in an organization.
Initially, the department manager provides an approved personnel requisition to HR. The requisition may specify replacement for an employee who is resigning, retiring, or being discharged. Alternatively, it may request an employee to fill a position that did not previously exist. A department manager will have procedures to follow involving steps mandated by the organization before HR receives the requisition. The specific steps to be taken are usually related to the nature of the requisition.
If a request is for a new employee who represents an addition to a department’s workforce, in the majority of organizations the department manager will be expected to go through a justification process to secure approval for the added position from higher management. This process may or may not involve input from HR. However, for a new or additional position, HR will be unable to recruit without approval from higher management. In some organizations, if the personnel requirement is for a direct replacement, then a department manager is empowered to initiate a requisition and submit it directly to HR.
Close attention may be brought to bear on staffing levels. In organizations that are experiencing financial difficulties or undergoing reengineering or a significant rearrangement of personnel, senior managers may elect to review all positions that become available to determine if they must remain unfilled. In such an environment, higher management may reserve the right of review and approval for all staffing requests, even direct replacements.
Once a personnel requisition is approved, it travels from a department manager to HR. The HR department may or may not know a particular requisition is coming. Human resources will expect a requisition if it is to replace a retiring employee or person who has been discharged because HR will have been involved in processing the retirement or the discharge. If the requisition is for an employee to fill a newly created position, then HR may not receive advance notification.
The next step involves the job description for the position in question. A department manager or direct supervisor usually has the responsibility to provide an accurate job description that is either new or updated, as appropriate. If a requisition is for a direct replacement that was known in advance to HR, then the appropriate job description will usually be recovered from company files and reviewed. A department manager and direct supervisor will typically be asked to examine the position description and determine if it should be updated. If a request is for a newly created position, then HR will expect to receive a new job description along with or immediately following the requisition. The HR department is often able to assist in developing or updating a job description. However, most of the information necessary for doing so will be available to a direct supervisor or department manager rather than to HR.
An accurate job description is essential for getting the recruiting process properly under way. Human resources will require an understanding of the major job duties for the open position so that they can produce a job posting seeking internal applicants, if possible, and to advertise for external applicants. As soon as people begin to apply for the position and screening interviews are started, HR will require information from the job description to describe the position to applicants in an accurate and correct manner.
At the time an approved personnel requisition is submitted, a department manager should have an accurate, up-to-date description of job duties and a checklist of the experience and qualifications to look for in the individuals who are to be interviewed. This information is contained in a comprehensive and correctly written job description. A department manager should be prepared to review appropriate internal candidates as well as those from outside, interview the best prospects for the position in question, and have all applicants’ references checked and academic credentials verified as necessary. These steps must be completed for all applicants. Typically, between two and five applicants are interviewed for an open position.
When the HR department receives a personnel requisition, its initial consideration is to determine whether the position is to be posted internally to the organization. Most organizations, especially large ones, maintain job-posting systems for use by existing employees. These provide opportunities for promotion or transfer to current employees. In some locations, internal posting and external advertising commence at the same time. Typically, an organization-wide employer posting system will provide a reasonable time period, typically a week, for internal candidates to apply before external candidates are considered. An exception occasionally arises when a position requires specialized training or a specific skill that is known to be missing among present employees. Such positions usually involve skilled technical or professional expertise. In such a situation, an external search is started immediately upon receipt of a requisition.
Regardless of the source of candidates, HR has the job of providing a department manager with a number of candidates who meet the stated minimum qualifications of the position. The number of candidates to be supplied varies. Salient factors involve normal departmental or organizational practices, considerations of equity and diversity, and the labor market from which candidates are to be sought. Conducting interviews is costly in terms of time and expense. Some high-skill professionals may be in such short supply or high demand that an organization may have only one or two qualified candidates. For most entry-level positions, HR should be able to provide a department manager with five or six reasonably qualified candidates without consuming too much time conducting screening interviews.
When hiring entry-level personnel, a department manager should be able to select one suitable employee from among five or six candidates who all meet the published minimum requirements for the position. Human resources and department managers do not always agree on the appropriate number of candidates. Managers may insist on interviewing an excessive number of candidates, searching for one who significantly exceeds the minimum requirements of the position, looking, in short, for the ideal person. Finding the ideal candidate would reduce or eliminate the need for training. However, the effort and expense involved in searching for an ideal candidate usually exceeds what is allocated for the search and results in extra work for the recruitment system. An ideal candidate rarely appears. If a position requires an ideal candidate (for example, an assistant for a senior executive), then the minimum requirements submitted in a requisition should be adjusted to reflect such a need.
When applicants are plentiful, HR may simply forward the résumés of people who appear to be minimally qualified. Such a determination is made by reviewing statements that have been made on paper and not by actually conducting screening interviews. Managers then review the applications and select candidates to interview. While some managers prefer to work in this manner, such an approach creates more work for them and subverts the effectiveness of an established system. These managers are conducting their own initial screening as well as interviewing candidates. Human resources is often inappropriately blamed when a poor selection decision is made.
Human resources time that is spent finding and referring candidates and a department manager’s time that is spent interviewing are normal organizational costs related to recruiting. Lost productivity as well as training and orientation activities must be included when calculating the true cost of recruitment. The latter are indirect costs, but they are real. The extent that department and HR personnel are able to cooperate in recruitment will directly affect the efficiency of the process.
When meeting with candidates, department personnel should avoid discussing compensation except in the most general terms, such as describing the pay range for a position. Discussion or explanation of employee benefits should not be attempted by departmental personnel. Benefits information can rapidly become complicated, especially when an organization has a benefits structure that includes choices and when HR is the only department prepared to address or explain benefit options.
Managers are strongly advised not to extend an offer of employment during a departmental interview. This admonition is even more important when a candidate interviews well and the manager is being swayed by the performance. All offers of employment are ordinarily processed through HR. Formal offers must be extended conditionally and considered firm only upon completion of successful reference and background checks and receiving proper medical clearance via a pre-employment physical examination.
An occasional point of contention between a department manager and HR is the timeliness of having a new employee start once an offer has been made and accepted. Managers often feel that new persons ought to be able to start work immediately unless a period of notice for another employer must be made.
Human resources will ordinarily take all reasonable steps to have new employees begin work quickly and efficiently. Reference and background checking are absolutely essential and require time. An organization’s employee health service or employee health physician, not HR, controls appointment times for pre-employment physical examinations.
(Jr. 205-209)
Jr., L. Fleming F., Charles McConnell. Human Resource Management in Health Care, 2nd Edition. Jones & Bartlett Learning, 08/2013. VitalBook file.
CH 13
LEGAL AND OTHER PREREQUISITES
There are many legal statutes affecting employment practices. The laws having the most effects on interviewing include Title VII of the Civil Rights Act (1964), the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (1967, amended in 1986), and the Americans with Disabilities Act (1992). Most states and many municipalities have enacted laws and ordinances that address local issues. All requirements in this legislation must be met.
As employment legislation has been enacted, many of the questions and practices that were used for years on application forms and that regularly figured in employment interviews have become illegal. Since the mid-1960s, approximately two-thirds of the information formerly requested on a typical employment application has become inaccessible because of legal constraints. As well as addressing information requested on paper, these prohibitions apply to interview questioning and designate what can or cannot legally be asked of job applicants.
This chapter encompasses the process of employee recruitment from preparation for an interview to appropriate follow-up after the interview has been concluded. The concerns presented here extend beyond the legalities of an interview. The perspective is that of a department manager interviewing a prospective employee. Pertinent legal precautions are presented as appropriate in the process.
(Jr. 241)
Jr., L. Fleming F., Charles McConnell. Human Resource Management in Health Care, 2nd Edition. Jones & Bartlett Learning, 08/2013. VitalBook file.
• U. S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). (2011). Retrieved from http://www.eeoc.gov/
Montgomery, C. E. (1996). Organizational fit is key to job success. HR Magazine, 41(1), 94-97
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