New jobs on Mill Lane: The Mill Lane bakehouse is built. From March, all of Lena's Bakery Ltd's bread will be baked there from 2 a.m., and the vans leave for the three shops at five.
What the night shift needs
- A head baker to run it
- Six bakers
- Lena's six shop bakers are moving to nights, but one retires in June.
- None of them has ever run a shift.
No hiring whoever walks in: Lena cannot put a sign in the window and hire whoever walks in first. One wrong hire at two in the morning, with nobody awake to check the dough, costs a whole morning's bread in three shops.
Filling a job has two halves. First the business finds people who could do the job well and gets them to apply (recruitment). Then it chooses the best of those who applied (selection). People often call the whole thing, both halves together, recruitment. The steps run in the same order in a bakery or a bank.
How Lena fills the Mill Lane jobs
Spot the vacancy
Lena's plan shows the gap: the night shift needs a head baker and six bakers, and one of her six bakers retires in June. A vacancy also opens when someone leaves, retires or is promoted.
Write the job description
What the job is: its title, duties, hours, pay, where it is done and who the person reports to.
Write the person specification
Who can do it: the skills, qualifications, experience and personal qualities the right person needs.
Advertise the job
Tell the right people the job exists, inside the company, outside it, or both, and ask them to apply.
Select
Sort the applications, interview and test the best, check references, and offer the job to the strongest candidate.
| Job description (the job) | Person specification (the person) | |
|---|---|---|
| The question it answers | What will this person do? | What kind of person can do it? |
| For a night baker at Mill Lane | Mix, shape and bake bread for three shops; 2 a.m. to 10 a.m., five nights a week; reports to the head baker; paid the bakery's living-wage rate | At least a year in a bakery; a food hygiene certificate; happy to work nights; careful and reliable with little supervision |
| What it is used for | The job advert, and later the employment contract | Shortlisting: every application is checked against it |
Job or person?: A job description is about the job: duties, hours, pay, place. A person specification is about the person: skills, qualifications, experience, qualities.
'Must hold a food hygiene certificate' goes in the person specification. 'Bakes 1,000 loaves a night' goes in the job description.
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Once Lena knows who she is looking for, she has to reach them.
Methods of recruitment: The ways a business tells people about a job and gets them to apply are its methods of recruitment. They fall into two groups: looking inside the business, and looking outside it.
Inside or outside?: Internal recruitment fills a job with someone who already works for the business. External recruitment fills it with someone from outside.
The only question is where the new person comes from. Either way, the same selection steps follow.
Internal methods
- Promotion: an employee moves up to a more senior job
- Transfer (redeployment): an employee moves sideways to another job or site
- Internal advert: the job is posted on the staff noticeboard, group chat or intranet
External methods
- A job advert on job websites, on social media or in a local newspaper
- A recruitment agency: a firm paid to find and screen candidates
- Headhunting: approaching one person who works for another business
- A job centre, or a careers fair at a college or university
- Referral: staff recommend people they know
At Lena's Bakery Ltd
- Head baker: Priti, a baker at the High Street shop for four years, is invited to apply
- The shop bakers move to the same jobs at Mill Lane: a transfer to a new site
- Two more bakers: an advert on a local job website and a stall at the catering college
Each method reaches different people at a different cost. The local job website costs Lena $150 and reaches hundreds of people nearby, many of them with no bakery experience. A recruitment agency would find her experienced night bakers and check them first, but it charges 15% of each new baker's first-year pay.
| Method | Who it reaches | Cost | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Internal advert | People already working in the business | Almost nothing | Senior jobs where knowing the business matters |
| Job website or social media | Many local people, of every skill level | Low | Jobs many people could do, like night bakers |
| Recruitment agency | Experienced people the agency has already checked | High: a fee per person hired | Specialist or urgent jobs |
| Headhunting | One named person working for another business | Highest | A senior job very few people can do |
| Referral | Friends and contacts of current staff | A small bonus to the employee | Jobs where trust matters |
Match the method to the job: The rarer the skill, the wider and dearer the search. Two bakers can be found with a $150 advert. One person who has already run a night shift may need an agency or a headhunter.
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Twenty applications: The website advert and the college stall bring in twenty applications in a month, far more than her first advert did. Lena needs two.
She cannot interview twenty people properly, and she cannot guess. Choosing the right two is selection.
How Lena selects
Shortlist
She checks each application form or CV (curriculum vitae, a summary of a person's education and work) against the person specification. No bakery experience or no hygiene certificate, and the application stops there. Six are left: the shortlist.
Interview
Each person on the shortlist meets Lena and Marco. They ask everyone the same questions, so the answers can be compared fairly.
Test
A trial shift: each candidate bakes a batch of bread at Mill Lane. It shows what an interview cannot: whether they can actually do the job at three in the morning.
Check references
Lena asks each candidate's last employer whether they were reliable, honest and on time.
Offer the job
The best two receive a job offer with the pay, the hours and a start date. The others are told, politely, and their details are kept for the next vacancy.
Every step costs time and money, so a business matches the effort to the job. The head baker will run the night shift with nobody senior on site, so Lena will interview twice and take up every reference. For a Saturday counter assistant, one short interview may be enough.
Recruitment or selection?: The advert, the agency and the careers fair are recruitment: they bring people in. Shortlisting, interviews, tests and references are selection: they choose between them.
A question about one is not answered by describing the other.
Who runs the night shift?: The head baker will be in charge of six bakers, a room full of ovens and the morning bread for three shops. Nobody at Lena's Bakery Ltd has ever run a shift.
Route 1: inside
- Promote Priti, who has baked at the High Street shop for four years and knows every recipe.
Route 2: outside
- Look outside, perhaps for someone who has run a night shift at Goldcrust plc's large bakery.
Each route has a price.
| Internal: promote Priti | External: hire from outside | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | Low: no advert and no agency fee | Higher: adverts or an agency fee, and more interview time |
| Speed | Fast: Priti could start next week | Slow: an agency search can take two months |
| Risk of a wrong choice | Low: four years of Priti's work to judge her by | Higher: an interview, a trial shift and references are all Lena has |
| Settling in | Priti already knows the recipes, the suppliers and the team | The new person needs time to learn how the bakery works |
| Choice | A pool of one or two | A much larger pool, including people who have run a night shift |
| New skills and ideas | Only what the bakery already knows | Fresh methods, such as how a large bakery plans a night's baking |
| Other staff | They see a way up, which motivates them; anyone passed over may resent Priti | Staff who wanted the job may feel overlooked and lose motivation |
| Knock-on effect | Priti's baking job now has to be filled | No new gap opens inside the business |
Cheap today is not always cheap: Promoting Priti costs almost nothing this week. But her baking job still has to be filled, often from outside, and she has never managed anyone.
If she struggles, the bakery pays in wasted batches and unhappy bakers. Count the whole chain before calling one route the cheaper one.
Internal fits when
- The job needs deep knowledge of this business: its recipes, customers and people
- Time or money is short
- Staff need to see that promotion is possible, so that good people stay
External fits when
- The skill does not exist inside the business, like running a night shift
- The business is doing something new and needs fresh ideas
- More people are needed than the business has, like Lena's two extra bakers
- Choosing one colleague over the others would cause conflict
Lena's decision: For the two extra bakers, external: every baker Lena has is already moving to nights. For the head baker, it is a weighing-up: Priti's knowledge of the bakery against an outsider's experience of night shifts.
How it turned out: Lena advertises inside and outside at once, and lets selection decide. Priti is interviewed alongside two outside candidates, and her four years and her recipes win it: she becomes the head baker.
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How this comes up: The case describes a business filling jobs from outside. The question asks about external recruitment, for four marks.
The case usually shows one of two things
- A business about to fill jobs from outside, often while some of its own staff want those jobs.
- A business that has just hired experienced people from outside to do something new.
Then the question
- Explain one advantage and one disadvantage for the business of recruiting externally.
- Or explain two advantages of recruiting externally.
- Four marks, two for each point: one for the point, one for showing it in the case.
The four-mark pattern
- Name the advantage. External recruitment gives a much larger pool of candidates, including people with skills the business does not have.
- Show it in the case. Nobody at Lena's Bakery has ever run a night shift; an outside candidate may have run one for years.
- Name the disadvantage. Staff who wanted the job may feel passed over and lose motivation.
- Show it in the case. Priti has baked for the company for four years and wants the job; if an outsider gets it, she may leave, and the bakery loses the baker who knows every recipe just as the bakehouse opens.
Trap: stay on the route in the question: Asked about external recruitment, 'internal recruitment is cheaper' is about the wrong route. Turn it round: 'external recruitment costs more, because the agency charges a fee.'
Trap: no case, no second mark: 'A bigger pool of candidates' is one mark. 'A bigger pool, when nobody at the bakery has ever run a shift' is two.
Explain one advantage and one disadvantage for Lena's Bakery Ltd of recruiting the head baker externally.
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