Strengths and Weakness of Using Employment Agencies

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Strengths and Weakness of Using Employment Agencies

Introduction

Human resource is one of the greatest assets of any organization. It determines the failure or success of any corporation. This is the asset of the company that ensures things are happening in the organization therefore their acquisition through recruitment plays an important role. Recruitment is the process of acquiring staff members to be used by the organization in attaining the organizations objectives (Stredwick, J. 2005).

Many organizations usually try do to cut down expenditure especially with unnecessary employee searches especially if an employee quits from work for various reasons. When an employee leaves his her position vacant, the organization has to fill up that position immediately to ensure the smooth running of the organization. Every employee who works in an organization no matter how minimal the job is they play an important role and replacing them means more time is wasted and as we all know time is money and this results in unnecessary expenditure that may be was not budgeted for( Marchington, M. and Wilkinson, A.,2008).

Due to this, many organizations invest in retaining their talent/values employee e.g. if an employee is good at certain task e.g. IT department, public relations, losing this employee can play a major role significant to the organization. Any employee who has been with the organization for more than 10 years and has climbed the cooperate ladder, the organization is used to the persons style of running the company and when this person goes because of various reasons e.g. retirement, the company style of management is disrupted.

However, everything begins with recruitment and selection. In recruitment and selection employees are given equal opportunities regardless of sex and race, disability or country of origin so long as one has a working permit. It is a process of acquiring a proper human resource for a company and entails the following procedures:- Job description and specification. The job description is the process of identifying the job title, the job summary, job duties and responsibilities, the relationship with other jobs, the supervision required, the tools and equipment to be used and working conditions of the job holder. Job specification entails the characteristics of a job holder like health, strength, body size, attitude, judgment, analytical skills, appearance and emotions, confidence and trust, sex and age (Stredwick, J. 2005).

After job descriptions, an organization will be having accrue as per the type of person they want thus requiring advertisement. Advertisement can be in the business journals, circulating new papers, on the internet and throughout sourcing. In the advert, the following will be clearly be shown as job title, duration and the end of the contract, the advertising organization, the department requiring the person, description of the main duties, qualification, skills and experience required, salary to paid and closing date of the advert. It may also contain the country where the job will be.

Shortlisting

After advertising the corporate start the initial stage of sorting and sifting. In sorting and sifting care should be taken to ensure no discriminatory practices. When in shortlisting consistency and fairness should be taken into account and no discriminatory practices. It should be carried out by more than one person and the selectors should not have relatives who had applied, it should follow the companys policy. The selectors should be people who have full knowledge of the companys job description and specifications (Hook, M. and Foot, C.,2008).

Interview

An interview is the process of selecting. The interview is used to access the candidates suitability, the accurate picture of the job and have a fair hearing from each candidate. The interview should be conducted by more than one person and the people interviewed and the interviewer should be prepared. The interview should be structured and have a two-way process. It should be carried out in a good environment without interruptions and give the candidates equal opportunities regardless of religion, political views, marital status, family affairs cultural practices, ethnic origins(Marchington, M. and Wilkinson, A., 2008).

References

The last stage of selection is referencing from the people who know the candidates. Referencing should not preach confidentiality of some information. It should be used to get some information such as employment history, health history, and absenteeism from work, the reason for leaving, opinions about character and suitability and probably the opinion of the reference about his appointments (Marchington, M. and Wilkinson, A., 2008).

However, some of the processes mentioned while recruiting are done away with if a corporation decides to use recruitment agencies. When using recruitment agencies processes such as interview, referencing, advertising, sorting and many others are avoided. This means that the organization is able to spend time doing other things instead of engaging in recruitments (Taylor, S., 2008).

Advantages and disadvantages

The use of recruitment agencies has some advantages and disadvantages as compared to in house recruitment process. To begin with, recruitment agencies are specialized institutions whose main business activity is human resource recruitment training and development. These agencies have embraced technology in carrying out their activities meaning that it is easier for them to have the best-recruited person for a company. Some of the recruitment agencies have embraced technology in screening staff members to be recruited. The recruitment agencies majority of them who have embraced technology in recruitment services advertise in the local papers as well as on the internet. This means that they are able to reach employees from diverse cultures as well as the best employees in the market (Gold, J., 2007).

As they use online services in advertising, the employees recruited who are from diverse cultures will bring wealth experiences to the organization thus introducing new ways of doing things. This is important because cultural diversity in an organization will ensure little internal politics which may arise from employees from a single culture is avoided and major issues are tackled rather than spending time trying to deal with politics of informal group dynamics of a certain culture. For example, the agency may recruit an American employee to the Japanese environment; this will have an impact on the culture of the organization eventually changing the structure of management in the organization.

Recruitment agencies have employment pools where various data of prospective employees are kept therefore using the agency will be time-saving as some of the employees will be available easily. This is because the recruitment agencies have among themselves structures and plans that identify prospective employees and their information is stored in their database. If a person wishing to recruit an employee patronizes their services they will only check in their database to see whether such employee exists in their database, if he is not available then they will make a formal advertisement on the world wide web. This form of advertisement requires prospective employees to make electronic applications as well as send copies electronically. This means that the cost of recruitment while using recruitment agencies is lower to the corporation that will be the final user of the recruited human resource (El-Sawad, A., 2006).

Another advantage of recruitment using agencies is the improvement of collaboration in the organization which leads to the introduction of high technology to the firm. In recruiting the human resources using the agencies, one may find an employee with high technology training as well as experience from some major corporations. When such kind of an employee joins the organization, he will come with his networks and if he was well networked with other corporations while he was working with another organization, these networks will try to collaborate with his new firm thus introducing collaboration to the current firm. Collaboration once introduced by the new employee will improve product differentiation, reduce the time the product takes to reach the market, reduce business risk as the business is likely to expand and reduce costs of production.

As the new employee comes in with technology the objectives of the corporation will be achieved easily and will ensure there is sharing of knowledge among the networks he is involved in (Santos, D, Doz, Y, and Williamson, P., 2004).

The planning process undertaken by the company is minimized since the company will be aware that any time they need an employee they only need to request the recruitment agency to supply the required person. However, the planning process should be in a manner that only the strategic positions are outsourced because it assists the board and the management to avoid situations of recruiting unsuitable persons due to conflict of interest by one of the members. The recruitment agency needs to be informed of the expectations of the company of such a person to be recruited to avoid a battle of forms. These situations arise when it is not clear to the recruitment agency about the person to be recruited for the corporation. Therefore the agreement should be in a manner that is understood and is for the continued improvement of the recruiting firm.

Most recruiting agencies provide induction and training to employees. Therefore giving such kind of recruitment agencies business to recruit staff for your needs, you will definitely get a well on job trained employee thus reducing the companys expenses on job training and induction. They also provide training and development to the staff they have recruited in specific areas. Being human resource specialists they understand each job requirement therefore providing employees with the necessary training to be efficient and effective in any job opportunity will be of great importance. Secondly providing training to recruited employees will try to give the organizations employees current trends in the industry by updating the employees with current issues in human resource training. If the organization does its own recruitment exercise without consulting the human resource agencies they may find it very expensive to train employees on current issues in the field they are working in (Liu, W. 2004).

Leading organizations who have used recruitment agencies have found it easier to embrace globalization through the recruiting agencies. These companies improve their performance by getting the best employees who assist them to understand the advancement of globalization. Indeed many organizations in the current world today who have gone global recruit their employees through agencies. This is because a multinational operating in various countries will wish to have the best employees in the world to be situated in a certain market segment and to achieve this through the in-house recruitment process will be very expensive as it is difficult to put an advertisement in over 200 countries of the world. Therefore recruitment agencies who have their own machinery of recruiting anybody anywhere in the world find it easier (MacCormack A. Forbath T, Brooks P, and Kalaher P, 2007).

The recruitment agencies help in executive search for foreign subsidiaries for multinationals to avoid situations of internal interference of day to day learning of the subsidiaries. As mentioned early they are able to have cross-culture experienced employees that are those who have worked in various overseas posting and have been exposed to various cultures. This kind of candidate come into the organization with various flexibilities and confidence that gives the organization a distinctive advantage over competitors thus encouraging competitive advantage( Liu, W. 2004).

There are a number of disadvantages associated with recruitment using agencies. Apart from being mentioned to be cost-effective, it may be costly in the long run. It will be costly in the long run when they assist in recruiting a person who is not qualified as per the specification of the company. This will arise when recruiting somebody online operating from a far end country especially in outsourcing jobs. If such a person is allowed to work with the company, the company may lose some customers due to this employee. The loss of customers will lead to the loss of revenue as well as loss of expenses incurred for marketing (Taylor, S., Beechler, S., and Napier, N. 1996).

As stated in this paper employment agencies have been identified to be part of a collaboration that has created a new competitive advantage for companies especially multinationals operating in various parts of the world. This is because collaboration has become a leading idea for multinationals operating in various sectors in the world. thus employment agencies bring into force pillars of collaboration. The pillars that have been adopted by the companies are people, processes, platform and programs. People as stated plays a unique role in determining the nature of business. People can make a business grow or collapse. Collaboration is made possible through the use of people. And it can be said that visional companies will combine two organizations to form the world. Global collaboration removes monotony and brings innovation which creates great products and new momentums to business collaboration becomes a motivating factor to people working for the organization as well as boosting business ideas by bringing something new for business executives to think about (MacCormack A. Forbath T, Brooks P, and Kalaher P, 2007).

I can summarize this as an employment agency brings something new to the company that assists them to reach, something new to think about, to make the minds of people grow. People have always with children minds anything introduced to them become like a new toy which creates or triggers the mind to start reasoning. Therefore global collaboration gives business people fresh toys that will trigger their reasoning about business.

Recruitment through agencies is a new idea that is technical which comes up with business opportunities and creating new capabilities that are transforming business worldwide and any person not taking it with the seriousness it requires will find themselves out of business. It involves the improvement of the existing opportunities and increasing the shareholders wealth for companies. Recruitment through agencies is playing an important role in creating businesses that have similar businesses in various parts of the world (Liu, W. 2004).

Talking of globalization without Recruitment through agencies is one of the worst business decisions that can be made by multinationals who are looking for expansions to various markets. This is because globalization reduces if not eliminates risks such as political risks, financial risks, business inherent risks, exchange risks and legal risks for businesses as it is acceptable in the home country. It improves practices especially in the technology sector giving businesses a competitive advantage. In order to have a great competitive advantage before entering into recruitment through agencies it is necessary to understand the factors behind it, the stakeholders involved, create standards for success, identify areas to improve and design a time frame for growth (Santos, D, Doz, Y, and Williamson, P,2004).

Recruitment through agencies requires identification of your partners, processes and how they will improve their cultures which should be adopted or discarded as their technological infrastructure and their strategic plan. This will enable one to identify the product life cycle that should be adopted in order to have an acceptable process among the partners. Without this, it may be difficult to have your partner accept your suggestions and even if accept the said opportunities that are associated with recruitment through agencies.

Conclusion

Today the world is going through the phase of rapid globalization. Almost every country has become a part of a big global village. The domestic and the foreign markets are being rapidly integrated for most of the countries. In this integrated world recruitment agencies play a major role in maintaining a close bond between home and foreign countries. Recruitment agencies are the major market player in the global market. So, human resource management is one such area where researchers have shown great interest. A huge number of studies have been conducted, both theoretical and empirical, to find out the factors that influence the human resource management strategy, whether the management strategy varies from one firm to another depending on which countries they originally belong to, how human resource management strategy affects a firms business performance and so on(www.ptc.com/appserver/wcms/standards/fileothumpredirect.jsp?&im).

In this age of rapid internationalization, international human resource management is becoming a very important research field. During the period of 1990s, cross-border mergers and acquisitions started to take place in huge amounts. Recruitment agencies have flourished all over the world in a very significant way in recent times. As a result, it has become a very important, huge as well as difficult task for companies to manage their foreign subsidiaries in an efficient way while considering global efficiency and local context at the same time without the use of recruitment agencies (Santos, D, Doz, Y, and Williamson, P, 2004).

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