Business is about people meeting needs of specially people. On the other hand, it is people who handle organizations. Therefore, recruiting and selection has been the oldest tasks of Human Resource Management.

In an increasingly competitive world, the need to hire the right person for the right position is a challenge for HR professionals, as the organization full of incompetent workers can miserably fail.

David Ogilvy once said that if each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. But if each of us hire people who are bigger than we are, we shall become a company of giants. It proves that hiring people can decide the growth or the decline of the particular business organization.

The facets of hiring people have changed considerably over decades, as HR is expected to respond to all the stakeholders of the business, investors, shareholders and most importantly customers.

The business community can never forget the fact that customers are able to decide the future of any business organization. Therefore, it is very important for business executives to look into how fitting this person is to the needs of customers. That is why, big companies in the world have paid attention to have a customer or a supplier in their interview board. This may seem to be quit strange, but, it is customers who know well what they expect from employees and the organization.

Furthermore, all the employees hired by the company are required to meet the customer needs, irrespective of the career background employees come from such as marketing, finance and HR so and so forth. Accordingly, there are three factors that have to be matched in hiring people.  


Task with the talent
A person must have a talent to do a task. Hence, these two factors have to be matched. Different tasks need different kind of talents. That is why, it has become so difficult to choose the right person with right talent to the right task. We are able to identify people with required talent and some with raw talents that need to be further developed with carefully designed training. However, the reality is that all these employees have to deal with customers directly or indirectly. For an instance, a marketing professional deals with customers directly, an IT professional deals with customers indirectly. Hence, both persons must have talents which are capable of making customers satisfied.

Not only recruiting but also retaining talented employees is a challenge in the business organizations. It can be easily seen that the mismatch between the task and the talent has resulted in higher turnover intentions. The Harvard Business Review points out that as much as 80% of employee turnover is due to bad hiring decisions.  Some people who have been assigned with so complicated tasks, don’t have required talents. These people ought to be either developed or fired. If not, the bad impact on profitability can never be avoided. People must be provided with tasks, having properly identified the talents.


Personality with the position  
Personality has to be matched with the position, because different positions require different personalities, always going beyond technical competency. Personality is the combination of characteristics or qualities that form an individual’s distinctive character. Management thinkers tend to define it as enduring, distinctive thoughts, emotions, and behaviors that characterize the way an individual adapts to the world. There are two kinds of adaptations; adaptation to the position and secondly to the organizational culture. Consequently, it is up to HR professionals to differentiate the personality from the candidate and then consider how far this personality is fitting with the position and the organizational culture. An outgoing, talkative and a friendly person would be more suited for a sales position, although a person having analytical and mathematical skills can be suitable for a position in finance.


Individual with the institute
  This match focuses on the match between candidate and organizational culture. Because the organizational culture has an impact on the personal performance, these two factors must be matched. A person who performs well in one culture, might not perform well in another culture. Therefore, recruiting managers have to be concerned on individual adaptation into the organizational culture. Even though it is true that organizational culture can vary from business to business and industry to industry, some kind of similarities can be seen in the companies in the same industry. Hence, better thing is to recruit people from the same industry. Organizational or corporate culture is the pattern of values, norms, beliefs, attitudes and assumptions. Therefore, prospective candidate must be matched with the institute.

Wrong hiring decisions bring a cost to the organization. There is no argument that wrong personw in the wrong position will make the business uncompetitive and finally bankrupt. The authority in the market is the customer, not the producer. That is why, all the business goals have to be formed to meet the customer expectations. Hence, people who are recruited should be capable of making business satisfied. It can be said that every business must focus on having employees that customers seek.

(Amila Muthukutti holds a BA in Economics from the University of Colombo and can be reached at
[email protected])