Townsends Theories of Recruitment and Selection

Townsends Theories of Recruitment and choiceThis essay will argue Townsends question into the enigma of enlisting and selection, teach and the gritty level of disorder that appears in the growing patience of resound. His seek is based on PowerGrid, which is an Australian Government owned Power Comp two. on that point has been an enormous increase in the number of cry hearts, due to this a large number of interesting issues read arisen such as spirited level of derangement in chaffer unions, despite companies spending long sums of money on instruction and recruiting. The research of Townsend is valu open and meaningful for in that location has been little academic research conducted in the argona of recruitment, instruction and turnover in look to centres. This essay will be based on the critical review of Townsends use of research methods, viewings, pr travelical implications and the concepts he utilise.Townsend adopts a three-step research strategy. Specifi cally, a seven-month non-participant argument observation, ten interviews of managers and leaders in the fundamental law and an abbreviation of the human resource documents compose the research method. Townsend considers the importance of PowerGrid call centre in the first place for two reasons At first, during the 1990s Australian judicature deregulation to berth supplies session, PowerGrid had grew out of joint efforts by separate power suppliers Next, the PowerGrid call centre was based on Erlang C model which uses numeral method to calculate and predict call volumes and keep balance of pinch within the call centre (Angus, 2001).Townsends findings suggest that the friendship was fitted to conquer its cost of training and recruitment by dint of internal transfers. Moreover, Townsend points out that training should heighten more(prenominal) on turned on(p) labour as it is measurable for call centre agents to show to their customers rather than solely focus on tec hnical trainings and the purpose of the human resource department is to hire the outstrip contri merelyedidates and filter out the ones who may be in workmanlike.Looking at the literature, the paradox between high cost of recruitment and training and high dimension of employees turnover in the sector of call centres, could be described as a sacrificial HR strategy (Wallace, Eagleson Waldersee, 2000), this formed the basis of Townsends research. By agreeing with (korczynski, 2002) Townsend accepts the idea that faces face dual imperatives for instance call centres want to play down their costs but on the early(a) hand have to suffer excellent help to its customers. But companies mainly use call centres to besmirch their cost rather than cover customer service, although call centre managers describes customers service as their main goal (Robinson Morley, 2006).Townsend agrees with (Mulholland, 2002) that whatever the casing of call centre it may be, Customer service repre sentatives (CSRs) have to show a high tier of emotional labor to the customers. CSRs are excessively required to have the ability of micro-self manage (Wray-Bliss, 2001).But on the other hand he disagrees with (Hochschild, 1983) that those CSRs who displayed arranged emotional labour suffered from negative consequences. Townsends argument is supported by findings of (Wharton, 1993) who through his research suggested that emotional labour does not cause any negative consequences.Townsend discusses the importance of the role of recruitment towards the future and wellbeing of an organisation and compares it to the role of a gate keeper (2007 57). It should be noted that by hiring competent appli send wordts the firms productivity and carry outance can be improved significantly (Russo, Rietveld, Nijkamp Gorter, 1995). It is also better to employ those hoi polloi who are willing to learn. (2007 478). Besides, Townsend agrees with (Breaugh Starke, 2000) who suggested that in th e buff recruits job satis evention and initial performance should be more important to organisations. That is, when the applicants are being hired it is important for the employers to see, whether the applicants attitude is suitable to organisations and this should be considered more important than ones technical skills.As mentioned before, PowerGrid is a government-owned Australian electricity supplier. Townsend acknowledges that at that place is difference between governments owned companies and privately owned companies. As he identifies the unique characteristics, there is a debate on whether the findings of this case could be generalized to private companies. Moreover, its rational to doubt whether Townsend has paid attention to the fact that his research is conducted in Government run working environment. Townsend argues that PowerGrid being a Government owned company has to have its call centers in the country, which increases costs, plot of land on the other hand they dri ve to be efficient in terms of operations. But being a Government owned company it has the protection of the Government in terms of costs. Private companies on the other hand do not have this advantage and may need to outsource their call centres in order to cut down their costs, to moo costs countries such as India and Philippines (Snow, 2005).Townsend identifies that PowerGrid makes internal transfers which it called positive turnover this is when CSRs travel within the organisation. Due to this the organisation is able to centre its training and recruitment cost which otherwise would have been spent on hiring and training new candidates. As (Robinson Morley, 2006) confirmed high staff turnover rate in call centres can greatly affect the cost impact on business and that could be direct costs that are training, recruiting etc. or could be indirect for instance bad customer service. But Townsend fails to use any evidence for his findings as to how we can see if the organization was able to reduce its costs by internal transfers. correspond to Townsend, PowerGrid use a three interpret training programs for the new recruits (2007 485). He mentions that the first stage is the basic training program away from the computer and it is done in an environment that is decorated with nappies, baby clothes and pacifiers. He mentions that the concern calls it the nursery. However, he questions the logic of using this article and shows some reservations rough whether using this word is appropriate for this level but then agrees to the concept of the management who call it as part of the fun in the organization. But training programs are at the entry level of the company and may give misemploy perceptions of the company, the perceptions may become permanent and in future it would be unmanageable to change these perceptions (Marchington, 2005).Townsend points out at some of the problems faced by Powergrid with regards to training of new CSRs. Previously the training time for news CSRs was eight weeks (2007 484). A new constitution was to be introduced that would half that time to nearly foursome weeks. Even though the management spend AU$ 30 gazillion on the new system, it turned out to be a ill luck as it not however doubled the training time as new recruits would have to learn both the systems but also change magnitude employee dissatisfaction. He points out the ineffective communication and low employee involvement during the growing and implementation of this new system when he mentions about the training police squad leader who points out that the management did not disclose to him breeding about the new system due to which the new system became an lend on (2007 484) to the old system rather than a completely new system. According to Lewis, (1999) there is a direct link between communication mental process within the organisation and organisational change implementation.Townsend identifies that the training for the employees wa s mostly focused on technical and product knowledge rather than on emotional labour. He believes that money would be well spent if it was spent on stressful to improve the emotional labour rather than spend it on other skills. But he fails to provide any ideas on how this can be improved.Townsend points out at the dissatisfaction of the CSRs with the management (2007 485). The employees are unhappy with the schedule for their trainings because they had to perform their training modules outside their working hours. The employees felt they were already overburdened as they exclusively got thirty minutes of release time which was spent mainly to check their emails. The CSRs would be dissatisfied because a CSRs job is more stressful and less satisfying as compared to other jobs (Holdsworth Cartwright, 2003).Dissatisfaction of managers can be get word in PowerGrid. As a call centre manager called himself between a rock and a hard place (2007 487) as they had to do continuous recruitm ent as some of their employees would move through to the larger organization due to internal transfers and many would leave the organization birthday suit as they would be heavily scrutinized through the software analysis system or will not get enough pay or benefits. So in order to retain the employees the organization must offer its employees good pay and benefits and should adopt a transparent performance management system (Raman, Budhwar Balasubramanian, 2007). in that location can be weaknesses identified in Townsends research methods. He used three steps to conduct his research. Firstly, he used non participant job observations to carry out his research. Non participant job observations accommodate two characters direct or indirect observations (Rowley, 2004). It has not been mentioned if he used direct or indirect observations, as in direct observations questions can be asked and may lead to change in behavior of the good deal observed, on the other hand indirect obser vations cannot be used for gaining information on perceptions, attitudes etc. (Rowley, 2004). He made observations only once or twice a week which seem not enough. Effective observation is an art and needs to be honed and perfected overtime (Rowley, 2004). There is goose egg mentioned in the article that suggests that whether the author has experience or has gone through training to conduct and observation at this level.Secondly, he then conducted eighteen interviews of key personnel in the company who included contact centre manager, call centre manager, training team leader, roster and planning officeholder and human resource representatives, out of which he selects only ten interviews that he believed were relevant to topic of his research. The author should provide more detailed criteria for choosing only ten interviews out of the original eighteen.Thirdly, he obtained data from the organisation link up to the human resource department and analysed it to reach the conclusion . He has not mentioned what type of data he used to come to conclusions neither he has mentioned any process or methods that he used to analyse and interpret the data. There are two methods for data analysis Computer based analysis and manual analysis (Borch Arthur, 1995). So in this case we dont know if he has used manual or computer based analysis or a combination of both. As some researchers use one type of methodology while some use a combination of both (Borch Arthur, 1995).Due to the debatable nature of Townsends research methods it is very difficult to find his results conclusive. However, he agrees with (Mulhollands, 2002) which suggest that CSRs need to show a high degree of emotional labor to the customers. Lack of proper planning and communication can be seen between the management of PowerGrid as they wasted AU$30 million in trying to implement a new software without consulting the training team leader and it turned out to be an add on (2007 486). He identified that th e recruitment and selection department should act like a gate keeper (2007 478) in order to only let in the right candidates. He emphasized that training should focus more on emotional labour, as it is the most important setting while communicating with the customers, rather than focusing on technical skills. Townsend fails to identify by how much the company was able to reduce the cost of turnover when they had to keep recruiting throughout the year due to employees moving into the larger organization or leaving the organization altogether.This research provides useful information for practitioners in the call centres. However, researchers who further study, need to research in depth into industry of call centre and should specially address the limitations found in Townsends study.Townsend treasured to consider the paradox of extensive recruitment and training conducted in call centres that are faced with high levels of turnover. He came to the conclusion that PowerGrid was able to reduce its cost of recruitment and training, by having internal transfers within the larger organisation. Furthermore, Townsend has been able to identify certain problems within PowerGrid. He has failed to highlight is there any difference between this call centre and other private call centres. He has advocated that there should be a great emphasis on training of emotional labour rather than technical training but he has been unable to provide any suggestion how it can be done. Finally, Non-participant job observations, interviews are types of qualitative research methods which can be called hard because of problems with their validity and reliability (Kirk Miller, 1986)REFERENCESAngus, I. (2001). An introduction to Erlang B and Erlang C. Telemanagement, (187) 6-8.Breaugh, J. and Starke, M. (2000). Research on employee recruitment so many studies, so many remaining questions. ledger of anxiety, 26(3) 405-34.Borch, O.J. and Arthur, M.B. (1995). Strategic networks among nice f irms implications for strategy research methodology. Journal of Management Studies, 32(4) 419-441Catterall, M. 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