In todays increasingly competitive environment, the biggest challenge is to identify and retain highly qualified and reliable employees. Organizations need to recruit quality people and to do so must implement and support a finely-tuned recruitment process which must consists of three fundamental factors: to be effective in producing suitable candidates, to be efficient and cost-effective and be fair as well as legally sound to ensure decisions are made on merit. Rynes (1991) defined recruitment as encompassing “all organizational practices and decisions that affect either the number, or types, of individuals who are willing to apply for, or accept, a given vacancy” This is particularly relevant for Marcus Evans one of the world’s leading business information and event companies which one of its main concerns is to recruit the right people in order to achieve good growth and excellent customer service for its customers.

Marcus Evans is a tall hierarchical structure organisation which has many levels of management and supervision. The organisation is functionally organised with separate departments for marketing, finance, operations, design, production, sales and it has a lot of employees from different cultures and backgrounds which create the need to the organisation to recruit people constantly.

When recruiting new employees Marcus Evans sets out its skills requirements in two key documents. Together the “person specification” and the “job analysis” act as checking devise for both candidates to be able to match their own skills and qualifications to what is specified and for the business, enabling recruiters to make sure that, applicants with the right skills are chosen for interview.

Since Marcus Evans is an International organisation, recruits its people in to two central types of recruitment: The internal recruitment method which the organisation fills its vacancies from within their existing workforce and the external recruitment method which the organisation tries to find their suitable applicant outside the business.

Large quantities of recruitment methods can be used, in order the organisations to create a pool of external applicant for a vacancy.

The primary method of external recruitment process used by Marcus Evans is to use their own resources which include their website and their own employees. Marcus Evans website provides a wealth of details about the company and a list of vacancies and contact details. It makes it possible for applicants to download details about job and person specification and application forms. Advertise through their website include the potentials to reduce recruitment cost and speed up the recruitment cycle, reach a wide pool of potential applicants and make applying easier as audiences can access the website 24 ours every day.

In terms of current staff, an additional method of recruitment used by Marcus Evans is employee referrals that they encourage employees to nominate “potential recruits through their personal contacts” (Marchington and Wilkinson, 2005 seated in Bloisi 2007) Recruiting candidates using employee referral is widely acknowledged as being the most cost effective and efficient recruitment method to recruit candidates however it is very norrow search technique in the means of that an organisation can only reach a very limited audience.In both cases, applicants must meet minimum skills requirements of qualifications or experience.

Another popular method of external recruitment used by Marcus Evans is the use of newsprint and other media sources. They advertise their vacancies through national or local press, professional journals and local commercial radio. Advertising is expensive and it is important to be selective in the choice of media, design, layout and contents. In addition, beyond cost, the most effective way to attract the right applicants in terms of qualification and experience is the professional journals. However the downside of this source is that usually there is a delay between placing the advertisement and publication date and this leads to costly delays.

Moreover, before recruiting new external employees, Marcus Evans creates a pool of applicants to fill a vacancy from its internal employees. They did so by first send internal applications using such methods of communications as email, team meetings, and the staff news letter. According to Taylor (Taylor 2002 seated in Bloisi 2007) internal recruitment has a several advantages for the organisation. Firstly is a relatively cheap way of recruiting, secondly, it gives employees more chances for career development and progression and finally internal applicants know what to expect in the job as well as how the organisation operates and also this reduce the risk that organisation has in whether the new candidate is the right for the job.

Barber (1998) suggests that there are three recruitment phases that generate applicants and maintain their position. Firstly, it depends from the organization to reach out the applicants and persuade them to become applicants, secondly, attempts to persuade applicants to remain interested in the organisation and to continue to pursue the job opportunity until the organization determines whether to offer them a position, and thirdly attempts to persuade individuals to accept job offers. Furthermore, positive recruiting occurs with the review and analysis of company’s recruiting staff, hiring goals and their overall recruiting budget. In this competitive employment marketplace in order for organisations to increase the ability to attract more candidates’ organisations it is essential to use multiple recruitment methods, have well written position descriptions and manage to market the organization to the potential candidates. “Organizations that know where they have been, where they are, and where they are going are on the way to achieving recruiting success.” G. Kameswari (2005)

In conclusion, Marcus Evans proved that over the years developed a successful recruitment approach in order to select the right person for the right job as is become one of the world’s leading business event companies. However, in organisations with high levels of staff turnover such us Marcus Evans, it may not be necessary to undertake a job analysis for every vacancy that occurs. It can be more useful to engage of checking whether the existing job description and job specification are appropriate for future needs. (Marchington and Wilkinson, 2005 seated in Bloisi 2007). Also by recruits internal employees before considering looking for people outside the organisation, it minimise the possibility of new ways that new staff may have in undertaking tasks. Last but not least, in the specific case of employee referral, unsuccessful referrals may lead to demotivated staff.

It is becoming clear that effective recruitment is critical to organizational success (Rynes, 1990). It is the heart of the whole HR systems in the organization. However, to best measure the effectiveness of different recruitment methods, organizations should rely on feedback from internal customer, from employees and from external customer. Finally, the most accurate assessment of an organizations recruitment methods and processes is the true ability of the candidate as displayed on-the-job.

Barber AE. (1998). Recruiting employees: individual and organizational perspectives. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Rynes SL, Barber AE. (1990). Applicant attraction strategies: An organizational perspective. Academy of Management Review, 15,286-310.

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In the prescriptive HRM literature, recruitment is seen as a process that should be supported by job analysis, job description and job specification.