Develop Recruitment, Selection and Induction Policies and Procedures

As the extract above suggests, getting your recruitment and selection right is critical. If you cannot attract and retain the best of the best, how can you expect your business to be successful? Effective recruitment and selection is a skill – as a business professional it is critical that you are able to effectively manage recruitment, selection, and induction processes. This unit will teach you how you can manage recruitment, selection, and induction processes within an organisation through the development of policies and procedures, implementing ongoing training and support for those involved with the process, and monitoring newly hired employees.

Great employees give organisations a competitive edge – it’s no secret that every company wants to hire the cream of the crop. Most organisations do not set out to recruit and select poorly, they may just not have the procedures, policies, skills, and know-how to be effective. Whether recruitment and selection is performed by line managers, HR, or a combination, it should be a systematic process. The flow chart below provides a step-by-step approach for recruitment, selection, and induction:

Have you ever heard or experienced any of the following statements:

• “I never even had an interview, he just told me to start Monday”
• “The interview lasted five minutes, but I got the Job!”
• “I’ve applied for over fifty jobs, haven’t heard anything”
• “I don’t know how my interview went, they never called me back”
• “I don’t know why I didn’t get the job, they just said I was unsuccessful”
• “I said yes to the job, but I’m not exactly sure on what I will be doing”
• “My first day was awful. I don’t know anyone and I just read an operations manual all day”

The statements above are the result of poor recruitment, selection, and induction. Unfortunately, if your organisation does not have effective recruitment and selection processes it will cost your business. A poor hiring decision for a candidate earning $100,000 annually could cost your company, on average, $250,000 (Staff, 2022). Examples of costs associated with poor recruitment, selection, and induction processes are provided below:

Now that you understand how the recruitment, selection and induction process flows and the cost of poor recruitment, we can begin to further define what recruitment and selection is and how you would go about managing these processes for an organisation.

As explained in the extract above, recruitment processes focus on forming a talent pool of potential employees and selection processes use various tools and techniques to select the best candidate. The way you design and manage recruitment and selection will heavily depend on the organisation, industry, and the type of positions you have vacant. For example, managing the recruitment and selection for a CEO position at a Fortune 500 company would be very different to recruiting and selecting for a cashier position at a Fast Food Restaurant. However, regardless of the vacant position, it is in your best interests to recruit the best possible candidate. To do this, it is important to develop and follow systematic procedures for all recruitment, selection, and induction processes. The first step in doing this will be to analyse current operation plans and policies within your organisation.

As with reviewing any business activity or strategy, it is important that you obtain a copy of all relevant business strategies, plans, and/or operations manuals.

This will give you a better idea of the strategic direction that the business is following and will allow you to see what policies and procedures have already been developed. There would be no point wasting your time creating a recruitment, selection and induction policy if it doesn’t align with your business objectives. Examples of the types of business objectives that may impact your recruitment, selection and induction policies may include, but are not limited to:

• Increase revenue
• Increase profit
• Improve customer service
• Support the community
• Foster strong workplace culture
• Innovation
• Expanding the business
• Downsizing

It is very important that you identify these objectives as they will form the basis of your policies. If, for example, your organisation’s main objective was to increase customer satisfaction, you would need to ensure that you are recruiting and selecting candidates that have great customer service skills and, as such, create policies and procedures that support this objective throughout the recruitment, selection and induction of candidates. Through analysing your organisation’s strategy, you may find existing policies and procedures. It is important that you check that existing policies are current, lawful, and are being applied. There is no point having policies and procedures in place if no one in the organisation follows them! The types of policies and procedures you may identify may include, but are not limited to:

• Application processing policies
• Documentation and use of standard forms policies and procedures
• Equal opportunity, anti-discrimination, and diversity principles policies
• Interviewing methodology procedures
• Job analysis, classifications, descriptions and evaluations
• Privacy and confidentiality policies
• Probationary period policies
• Recruitment advertising policies and procedures
• Internet, email, and social media policies
• Selection panel policies and procedures
• Induction policies and procedures
• Code of Conduct policies
• Attendance and Termination (Voluntary and Involuntary) policies
• Performance Management policies
• Sick Leave, Short Term Disability, Long Term Disability policies
• Discrimination and Harassment/Respectful Workplace policies
• Health and Safety policies
• Alcohol and Drug Use Policies

There is absolutely no point re-inventing the wheel. It can take a significant amount of time to develop policies and procedures, so if your organisation already has some in place, you may not need to start from scratch. Most organisations will have policies relating to equal opportunity, anti-discrimination, diversity, harassment and grievance procedures. The best place to start is to identify what your organisation currently has and list the policies and procedures that need to be developed.

Aside from identifying relevant policies and business objectives, you should also analyse how your organisation is currently recruiting, selecting, and inducting employees. Review the table below and consider the questions to gain a better understanding of what your organisation currently does:

The questions above are important for you to consider. If your organisation has predominantly always conducted face-to-face interviews, you may find it difficult to get support for the introduction of a new policy that stipulates all candidates require psychometric testing. You need to ensure that whatever policies and procedures you create compliment or add value to existing policies and procedures. Furthermore, you will need to ensure that any policies and procedures you implement are developed in accordance with relevant legislation.

Having policies and procedures in place can legally protect your organisation. For this to occur, you need to have existing policies and procedures that meet legislative requirements. If you disregard legal requirements, your organisation’s reputation can be ruined and there can be extensive legal ramifications. Legal requirements you should consider relate to local, state and federal laws including, but not limited to:

• Industrial Relations legislation
• Anti-discrimination legislation
• Work Health and Safety legislation
• Privacy Legislation

We will discuss each of these below.

Industrial Relations Legislation

The Fair Work Act 2009 is they key piece of legislation that regulates workplace and employment relations in Australia. The Fair Work Commission has the jurisdiction to carry out a range of functions relating to minimum wages, awards and agreements, industrial action, and dispute resolution.

Especially when developing employee contracts and terms of employment, it is imperative that you are aware of the National Employment Standards (NES). The NES list ten minimum standards of employment including hours of work, leave entitlements, notice of termination, and flexible working arrangements.

In addition to the NES, most Australian organisations have implemented modern awards that outline terms and conditions of employment over and above the NES. Some employees may also be covered by an enterprise agreement or employment contract whose conditions can be better than but not worse than the applicable modern award and NES (Fair Work Ombudsman, 2023). For more information visit: http://www.fairwork.gov.au/

Anti-Discrimination Legislation

Anti-discrimination legislation aims to remove discrimination, harassment, and unfair treatment within the workplace. This legislation makes it illegal to discriminate against anyone on the basis of race, gender, religion, age, nationality, disability, sexual preference, marital status, political opinion, medical or criminal record and a range of other factors. Federal state and territory anti-discrimination legislation you need to be aware of includes:

• Australian Human Rights Commission Act 1986
• Age Discrimination Act 2004 of Australia
• Disability Discrimination Act 1992 of Australia
• Racial Discrimination Act 1975 of Australia
• Sex Discrimination Act 1984 of Australia
• Australian Capital Territory Discrimination Act 1991
• New South Wales Anti-Discrimination Act 1977
• Northern Territory Anti-Discrimination Act 1996
• Queensland Anti-Discrimination Act 1991
• South Australia Equal Opportunity Act 1984
• Tasmania Anti-Discrimination Act 1998
• Victoria Equal Opportunity Act 1995
• Western Australia Equal Opportunity Act 1984

It is important that your organisation has policies in place to ensure that discriminatory behaviours are not occurring during the recruitment, selection, and induction processes. In some cases, discrimination can occur without the person even realizing due to internal biases and cultural perceptions. You should ensure that recruitment and selection processes follow strict guidelines and decisions are based on the requirements of the role and not based on an individual’s protected characteristics (such as ethnic background, gender, religion, or marital status, etc).

Work Health and Safety Legislation

Work Health and Safety (WHS) legislation is enforced at a state level and, as such, will depend on what State you are working in. Regardless of the State specifics, the general aim of WHS legalisation is to protect everyone in the workplace (employers, employees, customers, etc.). WHS legislation mandates that employers are required to provide employees and others in the workplace with information and training in WHS principles as well as safe premises, plant, facilities, conditions and equipment. Relevant state and territory work health and safety legislation includes:

• The Work Health and Safety Act 2011 of Queensland
• The Work Health and Safety Act 2011 of New South Wales
• The Work Health and Safety Act 2011 of the Australian Capital Territory
• The Occupational Health and Safety Act 2004 of Victoria
• The Work Health and Safety Act 2012 of Tasmania
• The Work Health and Safety Act 2012 of South Australia
• The Occupational Health and Safety Act 1984 of Western Australia
• The Work Health and Safety Act 2011 of the Northern Territory

It is important that all staff are trained in accordance with WHS legislation. All staff have a right to be safe at work and it is your responsibility as a business professional to ensure that this training is delivered and that safe practices are followed by all staff. Therefore, this is an important consideration for induction policies and procedures. Most organisations will incorporate workplace-specific WHS training during their initial induction training in order to ensure that they comply with their legislative requirements.

Privacy Legislation

Personal information may include: name, address, phone number, date of birth, signature and other personal details. During the recruitment, selection and induction process, you will be given access to a lot of personal information. You need to ensure that you have effective policies and procedures in place applicable to all staff involved in the process.

Fundamentally, personal information needs to be handled with confidentiality. Leaving application forms lying around for anyone to see is a big breach of privacy legislation. You should ensure that you are keeping potential candidates and all employees’ information in lockable filing cabinets, password protected databases or password protected files. Your policy should also mandate that the personal information of applicants should not be discussed with anyone who is directly not involved with the recruitment and selection processes.

As you can see, there are a range of legal factors that need to be considered when developing recruitment, selection, and induction policies and procedures. Let’s look at a few real-world examples of how this process can go wrong.

The article below provides details about an American Company, Abercrombie and Fitch, and their breaches of lawful and ethical requirements.

While the Abercrombie article demonstrated some outrageous discriminatory behaviours, breaches can also occur in regard to how components of your policies are interpreted. Australian company “Cotton On” received some bad press in 2015 regarding their employee code of conduct policy.

As these case studies have demonstrated, it is important that you ensure all of your policies and procedures are lawful, inclusive and well defined. This will be the case for all organisational policies, especially for recruitment and selection.

Recruitment

The most common breaches of legislation occur during the recruitment and selection processes. During recruitment, job advertisements are the main area where companies go wrong. Review the following job advertisement:

The job advertisement above is not a fake! A Coles contractor in Tasmania actually posted this advertisement on the online classifieds website, Gumtree. When creating policies and procedures for job advertisements, you should clearly stipulate what is acceptable. Of course, a Coles spokesperson condemned the actions of the contractor, but it just goes to show that even multi-million-dollar companies can get it wrong.

As a business professional, it will be your responsibility to ensure that whoever is creating job advertisements is doing so in a non-discriminatory way. The extract below provides valuable information you could include in your recruitment policies and procedures to ensure that you are being lawful.

Selection

Depending on your organisation, the selection process for candidates might include aptitude tests, IQ tests, personality testing, psychometric testing, referee reports and many more. In nearly all organisations, interviews are conducted (face-to-face, over the phone or on skype). The way you establish your selection processes and interview policies and procedures will also have legal considerations.

Consider the following potential interview questions. How many do you think are acceptable?

• What arrangements are you able to make for childcare while you work?
• How old are your children?
• When did you graduate from high school?
• What does your wife do for a living?
• Where did you live while you were growing up?
• Will you need personal time for particular religious holidays?
• Are you comfortable working for a female boss?
• There is a large disparity between your age and that of the position’s coworkers. Is this a problem for you?
• How long do you plan to work until you retire?
• Have you experienced any serious illnesses in the past year?

^{(Heathfield, 2019)}

If you answered none, you are correct. When forming your selection policies and procedures you should stipulate that interview questions must be focused on the behaviours, skills, and experience needed to perform the job. Failing to do so may leave your company open to legal action and may affect selecting the best person for the position. Now that you understand the importance of ensuring selection procedures are compliant with legal requirements, we can now begin to develop policies and procedures.

Policies and procedures are a great tool to use to convey what your organisation wants to do and how it will be done. They act as a reference point for how an organisation operates day-to-day and how they comply with legislation and codes of practice. Generally, each policy that is developed will have a procedure that stipulates how the policy will be achieved/adhered to.

There is much literature available regarding the development of policies and procedures and you may even find free templates online that you can download and edit to suit your organisation. If you were starting from scratch, there are generally seven sections that you would include:

^{(Adapted Butler and Page 2001, p.18)}

The steps outlined above are a great tool to use when developing or amending policies and procedures for any aspect of your organisation. Of course, for the purpose of this unit, we will be focusing on developing policies and procedures specifically relating to recruitment, selection, and induction.

Recruitment and Selection Policies and Procedures

An effective recruitment and selection policy will act as a basis for all of your recruitment and selection activities. Five good reasons for having such a policy are to ensure:

1. Job descriptions meet business requirements
2. Candidates are assessed against consistent criteria at every stage
3. The recruitment process is lawful
4. The candidate can be confident it is a genuine job offer
5. The process can be followed by all stakeholders.

^{(Slezak, 2015)}

The types of policies, procedures and supporting documents you may choose to develop will depend on your business needs. When beginning to start the development process, it is absolutely critical that you follow these principles:

• Respect for diversity
• Ethical decision making
• Selection according to merit
• Equal treatment for all
• Procedural fairness

^{(Slezak, 2015)}

This will ensure whoever is involved in the recruitment process will be consistently ethical, lawful, and fair, and are selecting the best candidates for your vacant positions. Having such requirements formulated into policies and procedures will help you to better manage the process – whoever is involved with recruitment and selection will know what is expected and what is unacceptable. To give you a better idea of what you may choose to develop, review the extract below:

Recruitment and selection policies and procedures may include legislative information, contractual information, graduate program information, recruitment and selection process flows and many more.

The best place to start when developing policies and procedures for recruitment, selection and induction is to create a process flow. The process flow should reflect steps your organisation currently takes when recruiting, selecting and inducting staff. Below is an example process flow for a typical organisation:

Your organisation may follow similar steps as those above, or they may be completely different. Whatever the steps, you should look at each step and see what policies and procedures exist and determine what needs to be developed. For example, does your organisation have up-to-date job descriptions? Are there person specifications? What induction policies are there?

Using the recruitment and selection process flow, the following table has been created to provide examples of the types of policies and procedures that could be developed:

To further heighten your understanding of managing the recruitment, selection, and induction processes of an organisation, we will be using a fictional case study of “Northside Allied Health”. The business has thirty-five franchises nationwide and the case study will focus on a suburban store in Adelaide. The first part of the case study will focus on developing recruitment, selection, and induction policies and procedures.

As the case study showed, it is very important to analyse your organisation’s strategic plans to identify relevant policies and objectives prior to development. Using the 7-step process for writing policies and procedures allows you to systematically communicate the information you intend to implement.

Once you have finished drafting and updating policies, they should be reviewed to ensure compliance with relevant employment laws, legislation, standards, guidelines, and technology relevant to your organisation. Reviews should be conducted regularly for continual compliance, as your organisation may have grown or changed, and amendments or introduction of new laws or legislations can affect policies, and how they are implemented. For high-risk industries, such as healthcare, regular policy reviews, at least once a year, are especially important.

Once you have reviewed your developed policies and procedures against business objectives and relevant legislation, the next step will be to begin the process of having them implemented – this involves gathering management support, trialling the changes, and communicating the new policies and procedures to all relevant staff, ensuring they are readily and easily accessible.

As mentioned earlier in this module, there is no point developing policies and procedures if no one looks at them or follows them. If the senior management within your organisation do not support your new policy and procedure, you have virtually no chance of getting others within your organisation to comply.

As the extract above explains, it is important that your new policy and procedure is endorsed by senior management as they will need to model those behaviours to ensure your policy is taken seriously. The six steps in the following section can be used for any situation when you are trying to gain support:

First, help them recognise the need for change by connecting to their goals and priorities for the organisation. Secondly, make a case for your proposed change by helping management see the overall vision/direction of changes. You should also be prepared, be clear, and present more than one option for implementation, in addition to allowing questions and discussion of other potential ideas. Researching other companies where the proposed approach has been successful is also a good idea. Lastly, building trust and rapport is important. Therefore, by following up and following through with management regarding proposed changes – i.e., keeping them updated on progress and results – you will ensure they remain on board and confident in your idea and abilities.

Depending on your organisational structure, you may need to follow all of these steps or only a couple. Similarly, your organisational structure will determine whether you will simply organise an informal meeting or you may need to prepare a formal presentation. Once senior management support your policies and procedures, you can then begin to trial them.

When you are wanting to implement a policy and procedure, it is important that you trial the policy first to identify any unanticipated complications. You can do this in four simple steps:

1. Implement it with a small group
2. Evaluate the results
3. Report the results to senior management
4. Make any necessary adjustments

The beauty of trialling your new policy and procedure in a small group is that you can iron out any creases before you make it mandatory and available to your organisation at large. Once you have trialled your policy and procedure and made your amendments, the final step will be to communicate the details to relevant staff members.

Communicating Policies and Procedures

For most people, it is a natural reaction to resist change. In a lot of organisations you will hear “but that’s the way we have always done that here” when you try and implement a new policy and/or procedure. It is important that you communicate in an effective way and avoid one-way communication that will fail to bring about engagement with new policies/procedures.

Depending on the policy and/or procedure, you may decide to communicate it orally or in writing. The best time to communicate work policies are during staff inductions and staff meetings. The table on the following page provides a list of benefits for oral and written communication:

^{(Adapted from Enright, 2021)}

Best practice for communicating policies and procedures would be to use a combination of both oral and written communication. It is a good idea to have a written copy of policies and procedures in a manual onsite and in staff handbooks so that they can be accessed at any time. Once policies are written, they should then be communicated to staff orally – that way you can field any questions and confirm they understand the policy and procedure.

In this section of the module, you learned how to develop recruitment, selection, and induction policies and procedures. You learned how to analyse an organisation’s strategic plan to identify relevant business objectives and existing policies and procedures. With this knowledge, you then learned how to identify policies and procedures that need to be developed or updated.

From there, you learned about the legislative considerations of recruitment, selection, and induction policies and procedures and how policies and procedures are developed.

Finally, you learned that in order to implement policies and procedures you would be required to trial the policy, obtain senior management support, and communicate the policy effectively. The next section of this module will delve deeper into how you can manage the recruitment and selection of staff.

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