Recruitment & Selection

Question for recruitment. 

Who do we want?

How to attract them?

How to identify them?
How do we know we got it right?

The flexible firm model

The concept of the ‘flexible firm’ was originated by Atkinson (1984) who claimed that there is a growing trend for firms to seek various forms of structural and operational flexibility. The three kinds of flexibility areas follow:

1. Functional flexibility is sought so that employees can be redeployed quickly and smoothly between activities and tasks. Functional flexibility may require multiskilling – craft workers who possess and can apply a number of skills covering, for example, both mechanical and electrical engineering, or manufacturing and maintenance activities.
2. Numerical flexibility is sought so that the number of employees can be quickly and easily increased or decreased in line with even short-term changes in the level of demand for labour.
   This refers to a firm’s ability to adjust the level of labour inputs to meet fluctuations in outputs. There is increased use of part-timers, temporary, short-term contract staff, job sharers and agency workers. There is a contrast between ‘core’ permanent workforce and ‘peripheral’ non-permanent. The general idea is that an increasing mixture of non-standard employment forms will be more efficient and cheaper.
3. Financial flexibility provides for pay levels to reflect the state of supply and demand in the external labour market and also means the use of flexible pay systems that facilitate either functional or numerical flexibility.
   This refers to achievement of flexibility through the pay and reward structure.

UK/US vs Japan

USA/UK	Japan
Mass production	Port-fordist*
Mass consumption
Bulk/Economies of scale	Economies of scope
Quick decision making(Only top decide)	Slow decision making(lower level considered)
Error occur due to lack of information	Minimizes error and brings consistency at all levels
Assembly line	T-working
Division of labour
Specialisation
* Post-Fordism is the name given by some scholars to what they describe as the dominant system of economic production, consumption and associated socio-economic phenomena, in most industrialized countries since the late 20th century

Lean production is a systematic method to eliminate waste when producing goods.

e.g. Just-in-time, kanban,  Kaisen, TQM, QC, ISO