RECRUITMENT EVALUATION: THE CASE FOR ASSESSING THE QUALITY OF APPLICANTS ATTRACTED

Abstract

We argue that assessing attraction outcomes is critical to systematic improvement of recruitment effectiveness and offer a new assessment framework that can be adapted by all organizations for any position in any staffing scheme. These methods (a) permit outcomes of different recruitment processes–attraction, status maintenance, and gaining job acceptance–to be evaluated independently, (b) support concurrent evaluations of attraction outcomes, (c) enable cost‐benefit analyses of alternative recruitment processes, (d) allow meaningful comparisons of applicants from different recruitment events, and (e) support more aggressive management of the recruitment function than is otherwise possible. An illustrative example demonstrates these methods using attraction outcome data from 5 organizations' recruitment of associate engineers and shows that not only do attraction outcomes differ, the value of those differences can be substantial.