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Large corporate policy changes usually take the form of a top-down approach based on a clearly envisioned routine and an implementation plan. Yet, the authors report on a study of a bottom-up approach in which key members of a service company created a new hiring routine that supported a company-wide new human resource management (HRM) hiring policy without any prior envisioned plan. We pay particularly close attention to the perspectives of this company’s HRM professionals, line managers, and middle-level managers. The authors used the literature on routine dynamics to examine in detail which actions were taken by key members in this organization to create the new hiring routine. Through in-depth interviews, the authors found that line managers, HRM professionals, and middle-level managers significantly differed in their points of view regarding their role in the new hiring routine, and how it should work best. As a result of these different points of view, the actors took different actions that nonetheless contributed to building the new routine including creating new internal and external connections, supplying expertise, and ensuring oversight of the new way of hiring. The authors also observed that the creation of this new routine also implied conflicts as a result of different points of view and actions. Nonetheless, the end result was the establishment of a new company-wide accepted hiring routine that even surpassed the expectations of top management. With this study, the authors contribute to the literature on routine dynamics by demonstrating the generative potential of multiple points of view and conflicts in creating new routines involved in large corporate policy change by showing how misalignments between the actors’ perspectives do not need to hamper the creation of new action patterns but rather support it.

This study aims to highlight the issues and concerns specific to information professionals (IPs) in academic libraries of Pakistan. It identifies the problems that academic libraries face in attracting and hiring competent IPs along with the strategies to be used to recruit and retain them in the dynamic environment of academia. Moreover, it provides a list of required skills that employers would look for while hiring IPs in academic settings.

Semi-structured interviews of 20 library leaders involved in hiring process were conducted from 16 public and private sector universities.

Findings identified interpersonal skills as the most desired followed by the subject knowledge and IT orientation while hiring IPs for the present and foreseeable future. Good salary package, conducive work environment with opportunities for learning and continuing professional development and speedy promotion were significant perceived factors to attract and retain the talented professionals in university library settings.

The study would be helpful for policymakers and administrators to hire and retain the IPs capable of developing user-centered services in academic libraries.

Practical suggestions made for hiring, retaining and developing IPs in academic libraries would be beneficial for other developing countries with similar context. It addressed an unexplored area in the context of a developing country and reported original research that will assist policy and decision-makers to hire and retain competent human resources.

More and more workers in Western economies are operating as freelancers in the so-called “gig economy”, moving from one project – or gig – to the next. A lively debate revolves around the question as to whether this new employment relationship is actually good for innovation in the 21 st century economy. Proponents argue that in this gig process valuable knowledge is created and transferred from one organization to the next via freelancers through their sequence of temporary gigs or projects. Antagonists reason that freelancers are only hired as one-trick ponies on a transactional basis, where knowledge is neither created nor shared. In this study, we focus on the characteristics of gigs. Which project characteristics lead to increased engagement of freelancers, and hence to knowledge-sharing behavior? Our study suggests that the gig economy can indeed lead to increased knowledge sharing by and engagement of freelance workers, provided that organizations and freelancers structure and shape gigs in such a way that they: (1) not only suit the task requirements at hand and (2) fit with the acquired skills of the freelancer, but that these gigs also (3) leave ample of room for the freelancer’s individual growth and development of new skills. This suggests that innovative organizations will need to shape gigs in such a way that freelancers are not only hired for their expertise, but rather that gigs also provide a learning opportunity for freelancers.

The impetus for this paper was the recognition, based on recent surveys and our own experiences, that organizations face special challenges when designing and validating selection procedures for information technology (IT) workers. The history of the IT industry, the nature of IT work, and characteristics of IT workers converge to make the selection of IT workers uniquely challenging. In this paper, we identify these challenges and suggest means of addressing them. We show the advantages offered by the modern view of validation that endorses a wide spectrum of probative information relevant to establishing the job relatedness and business necessity of IT selection procedures. Finally, we identify the implications of these issues for industrial/organizational psychologists, human resource managers, and managers of IT workers.

The industry-wide adoption of a novel practice is often considered to be an institutional change. Although research on institutionalization has been accumulating, how and why embedded actors in the field become motivated to embrace change that remains sidelined. Viewing the introduction of a new human resource management practice, the recruitment of non-compulsory certified manpower, which is still in its infancy in the service sector of Taiwan, as a new institution, the purpose of this paper is to identify the distinct motives behind firms’ hiring decisions, and examine the extent to which such hiring decisions are contingent on institutional conditions and firm attributes.

The data used to test the hypotheses were drawn from a survey on service firms in Taiwan in the second half of 2011. Hypotheses were examined through moderated hierarchical regression analyses in a sample of 254 Taiwanese service firms across major sectors.

Integrating the resource dependency and social contagion views, the study contends that resource scarcity drives, or legitimacy enables, service firms to deviate from traditional hiring patterns and instead adopt new preferences toward certified manpower. The study not only shows that social factors should be incorporated into the diffusion of a new HR recruitment practice in the service sector, which is traditionally based upon economic considerations, but also sheds light on the context-dependent nature of the process of institutional innovation.

This study is an attempt not only to test a dual-theoretical model on the extent to which a service firm’s new hiring pattern is influenced by two distinct types of motivation, but also to evidence how an institutional innovation, in terms of the regime of service manpower certification, takes root and spreads in the field. The managerially discretional account of the resource dependence theory needs to be reconciled with social contagion theory, which highlights the influence of collective actions and so provides a better understanding of the diffusion of new HR recruitment practices in the service industry.

Are White and Asian job applicants advantaged in access to professional jobs relative to Black and Latinx job applicants at the initial screening stage of the hiring process? And, are the mechanisms of advantage for White applicants different than the mechanisms for Asian applicants? In this chapter, the author proposes a theoretical framework of “parallel mechanisms” of White and Asian advantage during hiring screening – that White and Asian applicants are advantaged compared to Black and Latinx applicants, but that the mechanisms of advantage subtly differ. The author focuses specifically on mechanisms related to two important factors at the hiring interface: referrals and educational attainment. The author applies the concept of parallel mechanisms to a case study of software engineering hiring at a midsized high technology firm in Silicon Valley. The author finds that at this firm, White applicants are advantaged at initial screening relative to Black and Latinx applicants due to average racial differences in applicant characteristics – namely having a referral – as well as differences in treatment by recruiters. For Asian applicants, average racial differences in possession of elite educational credentials, as well as racial differences in recruiter treatment, explain the racial disparity in callbacks. The author discusses the implications of parallel mechanisms of advantage for racial inequality in a multiracial context, and for organizational policy meant to address racial disparities during organizational hiring processes.

LinkedIn is a popular and maybe the best job-oriented social networking site (SNS) around the world. Numerous individuals (mostly, jobseekers), as well as the companies (mostly, hiring organizations) have LinkedIn accounts. This study intends to reveal the roles of LinkedIn-based skill endorsements (LSEs) as well as LinkedIn-based hiring recommendations (LHRs) on the hiring preferences (HPs) of Bangladeshi employers.

The authors purposefully selected 388 valid respondents (employers) from different Bangladeshi job sectors. Based on their responses, the authors applied SPSS 25 for explanatory statistics and a “Covariance-based Structural Equation Modeling (CB-SEM)” (with AMOS 25) to measure the hypothesized associations.

After appropriate analysis, the authors revealed a momentous positive role of LHR on HP, whereas LSE was identified to have an inconsiderable role on HP.

In this empirical study, the authors tried to highlight the relatively unattended area of Bangladeshi employers' HPs that can be affected by LSEs and LHRs. The authors believe that this study will encourage the researchers to unveil the impacts of LinkedIn-based profile characteristics on job candidates' employability. This empirical study can also aid the employers and policymakers to look for a new avenue for hiring competent talents.

This research explores the expectation gap between tax clients’ motivations to hire tax preparers versus tax preparers’ perceptions of those client motivations. The study builds on limited previous research by examining preparers primarily from local firms rather than focusing solely on large international firms. The Gaps Model of Service Quality provides the theoretical lens for the paper. We employ the recently developed Taxpayer Motivation Scale (TMS) to measure four client motivations to hire a preparer: (1) saving money, (2) saving time, (3) legal compliance, and (4) protection from the IRS. We measure expectation gaps for those four motivations using matched tax preparer–tax client dyads.

We employ statistical sub-group analyses to investigate the effects of both clients’ and preparers’ demographic characteristics that influence tax-expectation gaps. Results suggest client gender plays a noteworthy role in predicting many of the gaps. In addition, complexity of tax returns, children in the home, and client perceptions of tax-preparer advocacy help explain gaps. Finally, female preparers appear to be relatively more sensitive to client needs. We conclude that tax preparers need to (1) better understand their clients’ motivations for hiring them and (2) reexamine marketing efforts to educate clients about preparer credentials and potential strategy options for tax preparation.

The questions of when and what types of human resource (HR) support are needed tend to be unanswerable for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). This article addresses this gap in the strategic HR literature. Hiring, training, employee retention/satisfaction, wages and benefits programs, and worker's compensation insurance are important to SMEs seeking to build strong capabilities and resources and to increase their competitive advantage.This article presents an analysis of the existing HR literature for SMEs. It introduces a decision model to help SMEs choose a cost-effective HR strategy, listing a range of options from hiring the HR function to electronic HR (eHR) and outsourcing

This chapter reports the results of a 20-year longitudinal study of how American unions have adapted their internal administrative practices to meet the significant external challenges they face. In previous scholarly work, researchers have reported that the administrative practices of American unions were far more informal, ad hoc, and political than those of business, government, and other nonprofit organizations. The authors’ 2010 survey asked US-based national and international unions to provide data concerning their internal administrative practices. The results were compared with findings from similar surveys conducted in 1990 and 2000. The results of these surveys indicate a steady increase in unions’ adoption of more formal personnel policies, budget practices, strategic planning processes, and efforts to evaluate planned activities over the 20-year period studied. They also indicate that unions increasingly recruit individuals meeting college, technical, and professional qualifications. Taken together, the results suggest a recognition on the part of many unions that adapting their internal administrative practices to the new realities they face is a fundamental and a necessary part of any effort at organizational renewal.