Health IT is expanding and creating 60 new high-tech jobs in Dublin. They must carefully recruit and select employees with the right skills and cultural fit. There is a "make vs buy" dilemma to hire inexperienced recruits and train them, or experienced workers. For Health IT's market, a "make" strategy is recommended. Both internal and external recruitment will be used. Externally, graduate recruitment, formal advertising, and recruitment consultancies should be considered. Selection methods include CV/interview screening, online screening, and assessment centers to evaluate skills and cultural fit for the roles.

1. Health IT 1
University College Dublin
Group Assignment
“Health IT”
HRM 30010 Human Resource Management
Prof. Pauline Kelly-Phelan
Group 21
Emily Glennon - 12441698
Cillin O Madagain - 12447998
Mélodie Pinault - 14201818
25 November 2014

2. Health IT 2
Table of Contents
Executive Summary.................................................................................................................... 3
Introduction................................................................................................................................ 4
Importance of the recruitment and selection process .............................................................. 4
Make vs. Buy dilemma ............................................................................................................... 6
Internal Recruitment.................................................................................................................. 7
External Recruitment ................................................................................................................. 8
Selection Process........................................................................................................................ 9
Recommendation..................................................................................................................... 10
Conclusion................................................................................................................................ 11
Bibliography.............................................................................................................................. 12

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Executive Summary
HealthIT is looking to expand its workforce by creating sixty high-tech jobs in their
new Irish headquarters in Dublin. When companies are looking for new employees they are
looking for talent, or individuals who can be performant. Although an organisation may
prefer to retain employees, and use initiatives such as learning and development
opportunities to do so, it is not always possible, particularly when the company is looking to
expand, as it is the case with Health IT. As a result, it is important that Health IT selects the
right employees with the right skills and whose values fit the organisational culture.
However, in a technological environment, this recruitment and selection process can prove
to be really challenging as firms face a “make vs. buy dilemma” that we will discuss in that
paper. We will also consider whether Health IT has to focus on internal or external
recruitment. Regarding the external recruitment, three different methods will be evaluating:
graduate recruitment, formal recruitment and recruitment consultancies. Then we will
examine three selection methods that the company could use: the classic one with CVs and
interviews, online screening and assessment centres. Eventually, we want to provide Health
IT with some recommendations regarding which method(s) they should favoured in order to
fill the sixty positions with skilled employees who will fit in the cultural environment of the
organization.

4. Health IT 4
Introduction
Health IT, a US based multinational company with 250 employees worldwide, has
recently established its European headquarters in Dublin. This company is a leading supplier
of healthcare information technology and plans to create sixty high-tech positions in Dublin
to provide a technical support service for its European market. As recruiting sixty people is
not an easy task, especially in a host country, we want to help the Health IT Human Resource
(HR) team to manage successfully their recruitment and selection process. The recruitment
and selection process does not begin with the recruitment itself. Indeed, there is a broader
process which starts with Human Resource Planning and a job analysis. After these two
stages, there is the recruitment followed by the selection, and finally the induction ends this
process (Carbery and Cross, 2013). We assume that the HR team of Health IT has already
considered the first two steps and decided what skills and knowledge are required for the
sixty vacant positions. Consequently we will focus on the recruitment and selection process
itself. But before, we will consider why the recruitment and selection process is so essential
and also the issues that have to be addressed by the Human Resource department of Health
IT.
Importance of the recruitment andselectionprocess
Different organisations rely on different resources, for example Glanbia relies on
agricultural produce, while Health IT relies heavily on technology. Ultimately, every
organisation relies on the most common, but also the most valuable resource available to
them, the workforce. The workforce is usually comprised of hard working employees who
help the organisation to achieve its goals year in year out, and so it can be said that this
resource is pivotal to the success of any organisation. In Ireland, where Health IT has
recently settled its European Headquarters, the highly skilled and educated labour market is
being recognised more and more as ‘the key to Ireland's competitive advantage’ (Roche
2007, 63). While this is an attractive prospect for Health IT, they will still have a big role to
play in getting the best out of their 60 new recruits, as how the workforce is managed is a
critical element in improving and sustaining organisational efficiency’ (Gunnigle et al 2002,
1).

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It is important for any business, such as Health IT, to understand just how damaging
an unhealthy employment relationship can be, while at the same time how beneficial a
healthy relationship can be for everyone involved in the organisation. This is where Human
Resource Management (HRM) comes in, as it is concerned ‘with the management of an
organization's workforce’ (Gunnigle et al 2002, 10). HRM is also concerned with
‘recruitment, selection, learning and development, reward, communications, teamwork and
performance management’ (Beardwell & Thompson 2014, 4). For a small organisation such
as Health IT, with only 250 employees worldwide, ‘poor recruitment, inadequate training or
conflicting employee relations can have a serious effect’ (Gunnigle et al 2002, 12).
Meanwhile, increasing an organisation's size, which Health IT plans on doing in the near
future, makes the HRM more complex. What this means is that attaining the right workforce
is fundamental for Health IT.
The most important ability of any organisation is ‘the ability to attract, hire and
develop new recruits’ (Gunnigle et al 2002, 78). Essentially, whenever companies are looking
for new employees they are looking for talent, or ‘individuals who can make a difference to
organisational performance either through their immediate contribution or in the longer
term by demonstrating the highest level of potential’ (Beardwell & Thompson 2014, 147).
Although an organisation may prefer to retain employees, and use initiatives such as
learning and development opportunities to do so, it is not always possible, particularly when
the company is looking to expand, as is the case with Health IT. As a result, it is important
that an organisation selects ‘employees whose motives and work values fit the
organisational environment, management approach and reward package’ (Gunnigle et al
2002, 115). In essence, this process is like a jigsaw, employees who don’t meet the criteria or
standards of the organisation just won’t fit, while employees who do will slot in comfortably.
The recruitment process itself is defined as ‘identifying the skills and abilities
required, and then choosing the most effective recruitment methods to attract a pool of
suitable candidates’ (Beardwell & Thompson 2014, 150). It is important to remember that
this is a two-way process as ‘workers enter the arena in search of jobs and employers enter
it in search of workers’ (Beardwell & Thompson 2014, 109). This process can be external or
internal, as we will discuss later, but it has to be carried out efficiently in order to ‘yield high

6. Health IT 6
quality employees’ and ‘predict future job performance’ (Gunnigle et al. 2002, 87). A good
recruitment process allows an organisation to forecast human resource needs, and meet
these needs, thus ensuring an adequate flow of employees into jobs throughout the
organisation.
It is imperative that any new recruits to an organisation are flexible, adaptable to
change, good team members, and in the case of Health IT have a high degree of competency
in technology. The sixty new recruits will also need to have good communication skills as
their job is to provide a technical support service for the whole European market of the
company. In terms of recruitment, an organisation can fulfil vacancies in different ways,
internally or externally, with fresh recruits or with experimented workers, depending on the
situation in question. We will now examine the possibilities available to Health IT.
Make vs. Buy dilemma
First of all, Health IT is a leading supplier of healthcare information technology and in
a high technological environment, it can be difficult to identify the right workers with the
right skills. According to Fredrik Andersson and four co-authors – Benjamin Campbell, Clair
Brown, Hyowook Chiang and Yooki Park (2008) – finding and keeping high-skilled workers
only relate to one issue: “make vs. buy”. When a firm is facing a ‘make vs. buy’ dilemma, it
means that the Human Resource managers have to choose between hiring fresh recruits
who do not have the skills required but who will develop them within the company through
training, it’s the ‘make decision’; or hiring experienced workers who already have the skills
required which is the ‘buy decision’. Both of these strategies have advantages and
drawbacks. For instance, it takes time to train the new recruits and if the market is evolving
at a fast pace, then companies cannot wait for the workers to develop the right skills. On the
other hand, it is usually more expensive to hire a high-skilled worker. However, when it
comes to the choice between the make and the buy strategy, companies have first to
“analyse how their product life and their rate of R&D spending affect how the HRM system
operates” (Andersson et al., 2008). Indeed, Andersson et al. (2008) argues that companies
operating in an environment with significant technological changes should hire people who
already have the required skills rather than developing those skills in-house; whereas when

7. Health IT 7
their products’ life is long and lasts for a few years for instance, “firms can take the long
approach and develop the necessary skills within the firm”.
Regarding Health IT, we can make the assumption that even if the company is
operating in a technological market, changes in healthcare information technology are not
occurring at a significant pace and products last a long time. Therefore, based on that
assumption and on Andersson et al. (2008) research findings, Health IT should have a ‘make’
strategy. They should hire fresh and non-experienced workers with the objective to train
them and develop their skills within the company. This strategy will have several advantages:
first, it is less expensive to recruit workers with no experience or just a little bit than high-
skilled employees. Moreover, recruiting people from the start will enable Health IT to create
a long-term relationship with their employees and the workforce will appropriate the culture
and the values of the company more easily than if they hire experienced workers. Indeed,
according to Nancy Rothbard et al. (2008), when a company hire employees who have prior
experience in the same sector but in a different structure, they can bring with them, not only
their skills but also habits and routines which can be really different from a company to
another. Sometimes, the ‘baggage’ they carry along with them can influence negatively their
performance (Rothbard et al., 2008). This issue will be avoided by hiring fresh recruits.
Internal Recruitment
As Health IT is just moving to Dublin and settling in this country for the first time, HR
managers should also consider hiring some experienced workers in their field. Indeed, the
fresh recruits will require some training before being able to be fully performant on their
mission. Therefore, as the new headquarters have to be performant as soon as possible, it is
essential to hire some high-skilled workers who can launch the activity in Dublin and train
the new recruits. Regarding these experienced employees, Health IT could consider an
internal recruitment by advertising the vacant jobs within the company where current
workers can apply (Carbery and Cross, 2013). As Health IT is a multinational company, an
internal recruitment involves an expatriation process. Therefore, the HR team should
communicate to the line managers that new positions in Dublin are vacant and ask them to
inform the HR department if they are interested or if some of their subordinates who have
the required skills are. Recruiting internally is a cost-effective solution and also in that

8. Health IT 8
particular case, it will enable Health IT to have some employees already familiar with the
company’s culture and values so they can spread them in the new headquarters. If the high-
skilled workers needed in Dublin are internally recruited, they will be able to train the new
recruits and help them adapt to the culture of the organization which is a really interesting
solution for Health IT. Nevertheless, it implies that some current employees agree to leave
their country to work in Ireland and it could be difficult to find people willing to do it.
External Recruitment
Concerning the fresh recruits it seems more appropriate to have an external
recruitment by advertising the vacant jobs publicly outside of Health IT to the wider labour
force (Carbery and Cross, 2013). We will discuss some external methods because Health IT
should hire the majority of the sixty positions externally. Using external methods could
provide distinct advantages for the company. As Health IT is looking to recruit employees as
a source of competitive advantage, it is important that the largest pool of diverse and skilled
candidates are made available (Selley, 2010). Through external recruitment Health IT can
expect the probability of finding the right candidates to be much higher. New employees can
also provide the company with a fresh perspective on the high tech industry which will help
Heath IT to stay competitive (Selley, 2010). Of course there are drawbacks to using external
methods such as cost and timing but through careful exploration of three recruitment
methods which will be outlined below, it can be seen that it would be essentially more
beneficial for Health IT to recruit the fresh recruits externally.
Graduate recruitment would be particularly beneficial for Health IT as it would
provide a pool of young, fresh and diverse potential candidates who could provide a
competitive advantage for the organization (Carbery & Cross, 2013). It would also allow the
company to target specific educational institutions that teach the particular skills and
knowledge necessary to fill the high tech positions. Graduate recruitment is also a cheap and
effective recruitment method but should be used alongside other methods to ensure the
best possible selection of candidates. Graduates may lack experience and therefore it is
important to look elsewhere and explore other potential candidates (Selley, 2010).
As Health IT has only recently established itself in Dublin it is important to include
formal methods in the recruitment process. It is not enough to rely on informal word of

9. Health IT 9
mouth techniques alone, although they have proven effective (Carbery & Cross, 2013).
Formal advertising through newspapers and radio are costly but have the advantage of
presenting a clear job description to potential candidates, minimising the risk of employee
turnover and will target positive people actively looking for a position (Carbery & Cross,
2013). Informal recruitment is also becoming a major trend in Ireland and therefore should
be explored as a potential recruitment method. Websites such as LinkedIn and Facebook are
providing employers with a cheap, quick and simple mechanism of looking for a large group
of potential candidates (Carbery & Cross, 2013). However, as Health IT are looking for high
tech employees to provide support to their team in Europe, informal online searches may
not provide the diversity they require in candidates (Carbery & Cross, 2013).
Recruitment consultancies is a costly method that may only be applied to fill a
smaller number of vacancies that require the most specific of candidates. Consultancies
have a database of the most skilled and suitable candidates to fill the more particular roles
available at Health IT. 'Head Hunting' tactics may also be applied here to source high talent
from competitors and entice them to join Health IT to provide huge competitive advantage
within the market. It is believed by applying this method alongside graduate and formal
recruitment, it would provide Health IT with the largest pool of talented, skilled and
competent candidates to fill the sixty positions available.
SelectionProcess
Now that we have consider the recruitment process, we also have to take into
account how Health IT will select among the applicants for the sixty jobs. This is a crucial
decision as the aim of this stage is to “predict an applicant’s job performance capability
specifically related to the role” (Carbery and Cross, 2013). Indeed, the performance of
employees depends on whether they have the skills to achieve their mission with success or
not, but also on their ability to fit the culture and the values of the company. Three selection
methods are being examined.
The classic process of C.V. review and shortlisting, interview and reference checks
remains one of the most popular selection processes used by companies with 71% of
employers making use of it (CIPD, 2013). It has been widely recognised to produce
consistent and reliable results (Carbery & Cross, 2013). Health IT should practice

10. Health IT 10
competency based interviews with candidates who present the necessary skills, education
and attributes on their C.V's. Situational based interviews would also be particularly useful
when dealing with unexperienced candidates such as those sourced through the graduate
recruitment process for achieving the ‘make’ strategy. (Carbery & Cross, 2013).
The online screening would be useful to process online applications which are now
incredibly popular particularly with graduate candidates. However, it has to be used
alongside other methods as it has many drawbacks. Thus, online tests cannot guarantee the
candidate is genuine and systems can be manipulated (Carbery & Cross, 2013). However,
online screening is a fast and cost effective method.
Although expensive and time consuming using assessment centres would allow
Health IT to select candidates based on multiple competencies that are displayed through a
series of tests and exercises. It is recommended that candidates are scored on their range of
performances in varied tasks and tests and that they are carefully observed. This would act
as a highly effective method and is currently one of the most popular used according to the
2013 CIPD report, with 43% of companies using it as a selection mechanism.
Overall, a shortlisting matrix should be used to score and select candidates through
these three methods. It is important that decisions are based on all stages of the process to
guarantee the best candidates are chosen. Once these candidates are identified it is simply a
matter of checking they have the relevant education etc. and are contacted and offered a
position at Health T.
Recommendation
As we have seen, Health IT is facing several key issues regarding its recruitment and
selection process for the sixty jobs they want to create in Dublin, the ‘make vs. buy dilemma’
is one of them. Health IT is operating in a technological marketplace but with few changes,
consequently, the company should follow a make strategy. The Human Resource
Management team should hire a majority of fresh recruits and they should hire them
externally from the Irish and European labour force. To hire these fresh recruits, we
encourage Health IT to use graduate recruitment alongside more formal methods. However,
the firm also needs high-skilled workers with experience and to attract these people, we
recommend that they proceed internally at least as a first step. HR managers should

11. Health IT 11
communicate towards the current employees to see if some of them are interested in an
opportunity of expatriation. Then, if they don’t receive enough answers, they could widen
the pool of applicants by recruiting externally using the recruitment consultancies method.
Concerning the selection process, the most cost-effective solution for Health IT
seems to be the use of interviews. Therefore, Health IT can first focus on this classic
selection method and then if needed, use online screening.
Conclusion
The recruitment and selection process is really crucial for Health IT as they are
settling for the first time in Dublin. It is believed that by following our recommendations,
Health IT will be able to hire sixty competent employees who will fit the culture of the
organization. However, after hiring their new employees, the Human Resource Management
team will still have a lot to do. For instance, they would have to manage carefully the
transition for the employees coming from a competitor or the outside to enable them to be
fully performant within Health IT which is another organization with a different culture and
strategy. They also have to integrate the fresh recruits and train them. Therefore, the task of
the Human Resource department in the new Irish headquarters just begins.

12. Health IT 12
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