Understanding contextual differences in employee resourcing

This chapter provides an overview of differences in the predominant ways of recruiting and selecting people in different national contexts. Recruitment can be defined as 'the different activities of attracting applicants to an organization'. Recruitment and selection has an intricate relationship with many other employment practices and human resource management policies and practices within the firm. The source of employees is closely connected to the type of relationship the individual wants with the firm and vice versa and has a significant impact on employee retention, since certain pools of potential candidates will be likely to be more mobile than others. In terms of recruitment and selection, in the Liberal Market Economies (LMEs) insecure contracting, weaker technical skills bases and a tendency of firms to rely on the external labour market mean that the hiring of labour is a relatively low risk process.