Generate Practices for Recruitment and Selection
Student’s Name
Institutional Affiliation
Course
Professor’s Name
Date
Generate Best Practices for Recruitment and Selection
Public administration is planning, determining, organizing, coordinating, and executing government programs, operations, and policies. Public administration also involves preparing civil servants to work for the public. Public sector organizations are tasked with the role of public administration. Public sector organizations are established in three different entities: government companies, departmental undertakings, and public corporations. A public corporation is formed by an act of parliament, the state legislature, or the central legislature. The parliament’s act defines its impediments, powers, intentions, and aims, and the government entirely funds public corporations. On the other hand, the departmental undertakings are under a given department or ministry and fully functions under the said ministry. Lastly, a government company is owned partially or entirely by the government but ran just like any other registered company by the companies’ expectations,2013. Ideally, any public sector organization is tasked with the responsibility of managing the human resource department through; staff recruitment, staff training, discipline, appraisal of performance, and payroll issues, among many others (Patterson et al., 2017).
In any public organization, selecting and recruiting the best personnel is vital for the growth, running, and development of the organization. However, several challenges are experienced in determining the best individuals to work for the organization’s betterment. In the recruitment of individuals in a public organization, political interference may be experienced. Politicians tend to involve themselves in the recruitment and appointment of individuals for the vacant positions by referring and recommending their preferred candidates (Chungyalpa & Karishma, 2016). The managers tend to comply with the fear of being rendered jobless. Therefore, candidates are selected based on their political affiliations rather than their abilities and skills. The dilemma of whether to recruit and select an individual internally or externally is another challenge. Choosing both internally and externally has advantages and disadvantages in that selecting internally saves the organization costs of advertising and training new personnel and encourages the employees to work harder in case of a vacancy one could land a promotion. However, the organization is limited to a minor pool of prospective employees (Kazagiqi, 2016).
On the other hand, as much as the organization will be exposed to a larger pool of candidates, recruiting and selecting externally has several disadvantages: advertising costs. The new employee could take a longer time to adjust to the job and possibly leave the job. During recruiting and selecting the best candidate for the job, favouritism and nepotism could also come in the way of credibility and fairness as candidates who have members of the family in power tend to be given the job rather than recruiting based on skills and abilities. Other challenges include; vast costs of advertising to get to a greater pool of candidates, geographical location of the business as individuals would not want to be employed far away from the cities and their families. The organization may be required to recruit individuals far and wide as there is a lack of an experienced pool of candidates in the local (Ifaistion et al., 2017).
The public sector organization that will be concentrated in this essay is the United States Department of Health and Human Services. Over and beyond the health department experiencing the challenges mentioned earlier, the department has other challenges that it encounters in recruiting and selecting candidates which include (Kronstadt et al., 2016);
- Few public health graduates are practising public health; instead, they are venturing into other fields.
- Those practising prefer the private field due to lower compensation in the public domain; hence the public organization is not attracting new talent.
The United States Department of Health and Human Services, otherwise known as the Health Department, is the government’s principal agency tasked with safeguarding the status of health of all the American people and providing the vital human services. Its headquarters is located in Washington, DC, United States. In 1979, before the separation of the education department, it was formerly known as the Department for Health, Education, and Welfare. A member of the United States Secretary of Health and Human Services, who is appointed by the United States’ President with the approval of the senate, heads the Department of Health and Human Services. He or she is then deputized by the Deputy Secretary for Health and Human Services and is also chosen by the President. Seven Assistant Secretaries further assist both the Secretary and the Deputy Secretary, and they serve in the capacity of Departmental administrators (Kronstadt et al., 2016).
As the Director of Personnel Administration at the United States Department of Health and Human Services, I would employ the following best practices for recruitment and selection of the best candidate for a position in the organization (Chungyalpa &Karishma, 2016);
- Create thorough and precise job specifications and requirements that will be used in advertising of the vacancy.
- Ensure impartiality and be systematic- without proper systems in place, every candidate will not be adequately interviewed, allowing room for neutrality.
- Make hiring decisions based on facts present- when shortlisting the candidates or presenting a job offer, only facts rather than gut feeling should be used. These facts present in the systematic process in place will be used to compare candidates.
- Proper training of the selecting panel to equip them with appropriate skills for the exercise. Besides having a fair and systematic selection process, human involvement is inevitable; therefore, mistakes are prone to occur, such as; judging candidates on the first impression, similarity in ideology to the individuals in the selecting panel, and stereotypes.
- Pay emphasis on advertising- job vacancies and selection criteria to be advertised across all platforms such as television, radio, and social media to reach a larger prospective candidates pool.
- Keeping track of the applicant’s information. As one’s skills and experience may not be useful at a particular time, they could be helpful in the future, and thus saving such records helps keep costs.
However, in recruiting and selecting individuals, criteria and strategies may vary from position to position or from department to department. For example, for a position such as the Secretary or Deputy Secretary of the United States Department of Health and Human Services, the criteria for selection is rigid (Kazagigi, 2016). The selection panel, which is the President’s advisor, would advertise widely, recruit internally and, most importantly, rely on employee referrals to recommend the President. Other positions for selection and recruitment criteria are followed according to the law’s expectations or the human resource department. Lastly, any different job selection and recruitment criteria are based on specific job requirements.
References
Chungyalpa, W., & Karishma, T. (2016). Best practices and emerging trends in recruitment and selection. Journal of Entrepreneurship & Organization Management, 5(2), 1-5.
Ifaistion, P., Ioannis, R., & George, A. (2017). Comparative analysis of recruitment systems in the public sector in Greece and Europe: Trends and outlook for staff selection systems in the Greek public sector. Academic Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies, 6(1), 21.
Kazagiqi, V. (2016). The methods used during the recruitment and selection of the new staff that affect the productivity of the construction companies in Prishtina and its region (Doctoral dissertation, Nova Univerza-Evropska pravna fakulteta).
Kronstadt, J., Meit, M., Siegfried, A., Nicolaus, T., Bender, K., & Corso, L. (2016). Evaluating the impact of national public health department accreditation—the United States, 2016. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, 65(31), 803-806.
Patterson, F., Roberts, C., Hanson, M. D., Hampe, W., Eva, K., Ponnamperuma, G., … & Cleland, J. (2018). 2018 Ottawa consensus statement: Selection and recruitment to the healthcare professions. Medical teacher, 40(11), 1091-1101.