Recruitment

This entry provides an overview of key mainstream and critical approaches to understanding recruitment, as a topic, activity and discourse in contemporary labor markets and work organizations. It begins with an introduction to recruitment as a fundamental but understudied topic, situating it in the entwined fields of Organizational Psychology (OP) and Management and Organization Studies (MOS). This is followed by a brief history which situates its development in the industrial business workplace. Subsequently, mainstream perspectives are reviewed, consisting of psychological-managerial conceptualizations of psychometrics and ideas of matching individuals to the job and organization. A subsequent section reviews approaches offering potential critiques of the conventional view: Social process-, Marxian-, Critical Discourse-, and emergent perspectives. A final section introduces the possibility of a ‘critical history of thought’ to theorize recruitment more adequately in terms of its four-century long history, constitution of the recruited subject, modern discontinuity, and relationship to OP.