Recruitment functions in recent years have assumed the importance for its increasing emphasis on human resources. Traditional approach to personnel management was to ensure routine activities for the maintenance of human resources in the organizations. However recently, radical changes in human resource management have taken place. Nowadays, human resources are perceived to be as important as any other important resources (physical and financial) of an organization.
This change in attitude towards human resource has developed new areas for personnel management. The human resources are the people who are part of the organization. Broadly, they may be direct employees, the part-time persons, temporary employees or consultants or any person or persons with a variety of other relationships to the organization. Within the human resources area, there are two major activities.
The first is concerned with recruitment, selection, placement, compensation and appraisal of the human resources. They are known as human resources utilization functions or personnel functions. The other functions are directed to work with the existing human resources, improving their efficiency and effectiveness.
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These are known as human resources development (HRD) functions, which are designed to enable existing human resources to learn activities for their effective functioning in the present jobs, future identifiable jobs and so also for future undefined jobs.
To increase the importance of human resources, it is now imperative for all organizations to retain the manpower and at the same time recruit and select the best possible talents in the country. Most of the organizations are now facing technological changes, resulting in radical change in the recruitment process.
Such a technological change, inter alia, calls for hiring manpower having higher skills and knowledge, which were so far not available. However, when we consider the recruitment of manpower for unskilled jobs, there seem to be no apparent problem for the organization, as unskilled labour is abundantly available in our country for obvious high rate of unemployment. For high technology employees, i.e., mostly those who are in the managerial positions with professional skills, the recruitment function is more complex and dynamic.