Recruitment is an essential issue for both companies and candidates. Indeed, companies cannot operate without human resources because it allows them to develop and increase performance, so it is a strategic issue. We can observe different models of the recruitment process identified by Laberon (2011) who proposes a model entitled “classic general model of the recruitment procedure”. This model of the enhanced recruitment process provides an overview of the important steps in the process from a current and practical perspective in order to recruit as effectively as possible. This recruitment theme is linked to social representations that allow individuals to identify themselves and adhere to a common social framework. It also contributes to the shaping of behaviours in daily life.
Recruitment is a structured process with different expectations according to the profiles recruited. Thus, assuming that recruitment expectations differ from one professional status to another, the experience and experience of individuals in recruitment situations from various professions will diverge. The perception of recruitment differs according to the practices that candidates have and the social representations of the recruitment process are not the same depending on the practices used. Thus, understanding the content of the social representations of executive and student populations could provide a better understanding of the dynamics between the social representation of recruitment and related social practices.
Thus, the Central Core theory was used to highlight the representations that each population has of the recruitment process. Indeed, social representations are organized through the presence of a central nucleus and peripheral elements. The central nucleus is what is common to the same group. On the other hand, the peripheral elements are organized around the central nucleus and are the ones that have the least consensus.
Through a free association questionnaire and after analysis of the results, it was extracted that students and managers have a different representation of the recruitment process. The two populations studied show differences in terms of representational content and more specifically in terms of the central core. The implementation of a second questionnaire validated these results. Indeed, this questionnaire using the “mise en cause” technique uses the double negation to identify the elements that cannot be eliminated and are therefore central to the definition of recruitment. Thus, for managers, their representation is mainly centred on exchange and communication. However, for students, it is based essentially on what recruitment can bring them, namely : stress.
However, this method has a number of limitations. Indeed, there may be a bias in the construction of the instruction when the questionnaire is completed. According to the responses received, many participants focused on the steps in the recruitment process because the instruction contained the word “process”, which explains why the majority of participants described it. In addition, it would have been interesting to better define the population interviewed, since many recruitment professionals participated in the study by integrating the population of manager. Finally, the possibility of conducting guided interviews for confirmation purposes could have been interesting in order to better understand the answers given by the participants.
Words I have learned : Central Core Theory (Théorie du Noyau Central) – Central Nucleus (Noyau Central) – implementation (mise en oeuvre)