An organisation consists of people. If you think of any organisation, whether it is in retail, service, manufacturing or any other sector, there are people involved

It is certainly true that there may be fewer people in some organisations than there were some years ago, due to technology replacing jobs, but I cannot think of any organisation that has no people

People are key to the success of the organisation. Have you ever been to a shop, a restaurant or a hotel and been frustrated by the poor level of customer service? Maybe you have even decided that you will not return due to the poor level of customer service received

By making such a decision you are actually deciding that you are not going to give your business to that organisation because of the people that you have dealt with

One poor performing employee could impact on the decision about your future custom with that organisation

People, therefore, are very important to an organisation and we need to be certain that we recruit the very best people to work in it

We could decide that the organisation cannot be blamed for the one poor employee who has made us decide that we never want to go to a particular hotel, restaurant or shop ever again

However, someone decided to recruit that individual

The organisation is responsible for the people working in it and for ensuring that only the very best people are there

In this module we are going to look at the process of identifying the very best people to work in an organisation

We are going to start by thinking about how we decide which jobs need to be recruited

We are then going to move on to think about the external and internal factors that can impact on our recruitment decisions and how we might be able to address them

We will then think about how we specify the jobs that we want, and in doing this we will consider the processes of writing job descriptions and person specifications

We will then look at selection techniques and what should be included in a contract that we eventually offer to a successful applicant. Finally, we will look briefly at the process of continuing professional development

To summarise, the process that we are going to study looks like this