Recruitment sources and employee turnover in sectors of the construction industry

Abstract

The construction industry organisation must secure recruits who will not only serve to execute the immediate tasks, but also enable management of the organisation to adopt longer term strategic frameworks. In order for management to execute these longer term strategies the human resources employed must be perceived as being available as and when required, or else having stable tenure. Recruitment practices within the industry have ignored an important factor when seeking to secure the potential recruit i.e. which source of recruitment is the more effective in terms of securing employees who remain within the organisation for an acceptable period of time. Personnel records of construction industry organisations were analysed and from this analysis sources identified which are predictive of ' lower turnover rates and also of stable or longer employee tenure. As a control, an organisation quite distinct from those related to construction was analysed as part of the study, to ensure that the findings were not spurious nor unique to this particular industry. The procedure is applicable to all organisations within the construction industry as well as other industries. Being relatively straight-forward to setup and execute, the procedure involved affords the organisation the opportunity to focus on those sources of recruitment which are clearly shown to be the more effective thus releasing organisational resources e.g. finance, managerial expertise, for application in other areas. The research clearly shows the link between Recruitment Source and Employee Turnover.