3.2(a) Deviations from agreed procedures
Your organisation may have set recruitment procedures (such as advertising methods) or you may have planned them specifically for this position’s recruitment. As you go through the process, you may deviate from those procedures. You will need to decide if the deviation was necessary and had enhanced the recruitment process or if it needs to be corrected. All candidates must be given the same opportunity to present themselves-so if deviation happened at a time that did not allow this, you may need to backtrack to get further information from some candidates.
If you believe that the deviation enhanced the procedures and gave equal opportunity to all candidates, you should discuss it with relevant managers and may need to get sign-off for its approval before making the selection recommendation.
It is best to avoid deviations in the first place. You can do this by developing a checklist or project plan to be followed with all recruitments. Agree on the minimum score the candidate will need during the interview. Your organisation should have a recruitment and selection policy that should be followed.
Sign-offs at various stages will ensure that steps up to the sign-off point have been followed. For special roles (such as executives), you may need a specifically developed project plan.
Difficulty in making the decision
Sometimes there are two or more candidates who seem equally suited to the position. In this case, you may need to seek further information through another interview (perhaps with new panel members) or other methods.
If there do not seem to be candidates who are good enough, you will have to review your recruitment processes-advertising medium, selection criteria, etc-and seek out more candidates. Often an inadequate candidate is selected and is then unable to do the job satisfactorily. This is very costly in terms of: cost of replacement and recruitment; morale of other team members; poor client or customer service, etc.