The recruitment process as institutional work - How recruitment professionals engage in maintaining the banking sector

Abstract

The recruitment process is a series of actions attempting to find and select the most qualified candidate for an open vacancy. Today, these actions are commonly performed by a recruitment professional, often either working in the human resources department of the company itself or an outside or centralized HR service. This is a vital activity that has effects on the organization itself but also the labor market on a macrolevel. This thesis studies the actions that these recruitment professionals take from an institutional perspective. It aims to find what type of institutional work they conduct in this process, using the theoretical framework of institutional theory, and more specifically the concept of institutional work. The concept of institutional work includes the creation, maintenance and disruption of institutions. From this classification, this study examines how recruitment professionals maintain the institution of the profession of banking. First, a literature review of institutional theory is presented along with a look into previous research on the recruitment process. The concept of institutional work has been built on the theoretical framework often called neo-institutionalism. Contra neo-institutionalists, institutional work theorists assign agency to the people who operate in institutions, claiming that most of the actions performed are done knowingly and purposefully. Former institutional theories make an assumption of institutions being automatically reproduced, whereas in the institutional work approach institutions are seen as something that needs to be actively created, maintained or disturbed. This type of agency can be detected in the work of recruitment professionals. This qualitative study interviewed recruitment professionals about the procedures they perform in the recruitment process. To gain understanding of the process, they were asked in semi-structured interviews about their actions, motives behind them, what factors affect the work they do and what consequences their actions have. These interviews were then analyzed with an inductive method. Resulting from this inductive analysis, four themes emerged: a discussion on the role of the recruitment professional, a detailed overview of the recruitment process, an analysis of the intentions behind the actions conducted in the process, and an image of the “ideal” banking professional. Various forms of institutional maintenance were discovered. The recruitment professional reinforces compliance by ensuring that the process follows rules and ensures an unbiased result. A uniform process routinizes the activities of recruitment, ensuring a similar result for every hire. Similarities of the people being hired is a way to avoid conflict in the workplace, making the team-person-fit a significant goal in recruitment. This can be seen as one way of policing. Creating an image of the “ideal” candidate can be seen as a discursive method, valourizing certain attributes of an archetypal employee. An unexpected finding of this research was the notion that the recruitment professionals don’t base their actions on feedback from previous recruitment results, but rather on their personal intuition. To advance this line of research, this study suggests that a way of measuring and giving feedback on the work conducted in the recruitment process should be further developed. The findings of this study and other similar studies can serve as a foundation for such development, providing a detailed description of what activities need to be measured.