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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.
It is becoming clear that effective recruitment is critical to organizational success (e.g., Barber, 1998; Breaugh, 1992; Rynes, 1991). Researchers at Watson Wyatt list recruiting excellence as one of five human resource practices that affect the bottom line (Grossman, 2000). Huselid (1995) demonstrated a positive relationship between low selection ratios and organization financial performance. Lower selection ratios are achieved by attracting larger numbers of applicants. Terpstra and Rozell (1993) found that organizations that engaged in more of five targeted staffing practices, including the use of follow-up studies to determine the most effective recruitment sources, had greater annual profits and greater annual profit growth. Yet, few organizations formally evaluate their recruitment efforts (e.g., Davidson, 1998; Grossman, 2000; Rynes & Boudreau, 1986). The SHRM/CCH (1999) Survey of Recruiting Practices found that only 44% of the 279 organizations surveyed formally evaluate any recruitment outcomes. If, as stated by Peter Drucker, "few things are as important to the performance of the organization as measurement" (quoted in Fitz-Enz, 1984, p. 10), general improvement in the effectiveness of organizations' recruitment practices is unlikely without renewed emphasis on measurement and evaluation.
In this paper, we argue for the systematic assessment of attraction outcomes-not just the number of applicants, but applicant quality as well. We offer a methodological framework that integrates recruitment theory (e.g., Barber, 1998; Breaugh, 1992), performance prediction (e.g., Schmidt & Hunter, 1998), and utility analysis (e.g., Boudreau, 1991; Brogden, 1949; Cronbach & Gleser, 1965) to create a new approach to recruitment evaluation. These methods...