Recruitment and Selection
What to know
Recruitment attracts candidates; selection chooses among them. Understand the full cycle: job analysis → job description and person specification → sourcing → screening → interviewing → selection → offer → onboarding. Know the difference between a job description (tasks, duties, responsibilities) and a person specification (knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics). Familiarize yourself with structured vs. unstructured interviews, behavioral and situational questions, work samples, and assessment centers. Selection tools are judged on reliability (consistency) and validity (measuring what matters); structured, job-related methods generally outperform unstructured ones. Understand adverse impact and the need for job-related, consistently applied criteria.
Traps
Questions often swap reliability and validity-reliability is consistency, validity is relevance to job performance. Another trap is picking the fastest or cheapest method when the question asks for the most defensible one; structured interviews and job-related work samples usually win. Beware of "culture fit" as a justification-it can mask bias. Also note that onboarding begins before day one and is not the same as orientation.
Worked example
A hiring manager wants to add "must be a recent graduate" to a warehouse role. Ask: is this criterion job-related and consistently applied? If not, it risks adverse impact and legal exposure. The better move is to identify the actual KSAs the role requires and select against those.
Rule of thumb
Every selection criterion should pass one test: can you show it predicts success in this job?