Author: indiafreenotes

The selection tests aim at measuring such skills and abilities in a worker that are decided by job analysis to be essential for successful job performance. A test is an instrument designed to measure selected psychological factors.

The basic assumption underlies the use of tests in personnel selection is that the individuals are different in their job-related abilities and skills and that these skills can be adequately and accurately measured for comparison. A great number of human abilities are complex and interrelated. Hence, these have to be understood in association with each other.

Types

(a) Ability or Intelligence tests:

These tests are conducted to judge the mental capacity (intelligence), sensory capacity (vision and hearing), mechanical and clerical abilities of the candidates. “Tests of verbal and numerical ability, with questions on vocabulary, similarities, opposites, arithmetical calculations, etc. are referred to as intelligence tests.” A questionnaire is prepared with objective type questions evaluated through computers.

Knowledge and proficiency in language (English or Hindi) can also be tested through ability tests. People who score high on these tests have the ability to absorb, interpret and analyse business information quickly and perform well at work.

(b) Aptitude tests:

These tests judge the aptitude of a person to accept future jobs. They explore a person’s potential to perform present and potential organisational tasks. People differ in their ability to do certain tasks and aptitude tests measure this ability to explore their potential to work.

“Aptitude tests can measure specific abilities or aptitudes (for example, spatial ability, manual dexterity, numerical ability, verbal ability) and are used to gauge the person’s potential.” Every individual differs in his ability to perform organisational tasks and, therefore, these tests enable the manager to know the skills and competence of the candidates to work on the job.

(c) Personality tests:

Personality reflects emotional stability and competence to perform effectively at work. Personality tests judge personal traits of a person (their feelings, thought about work, risk taking, confidence etc.) and test his ability to perform the job.

Personality tests assume direct relationship between one or more of the personality factors and ability of a person to do certain jobs. After assessing personality, his personality profile is compared with standard profile relevant for the job.

(d) Performance tests:

These are on-the-job tests. The candidates perform the job for which they are being considered. They are also known as “in-tray” tests as candidates work on a representative sample of the work. The data entry operator, for example, may be asked to type a page to judge his proficiency in typing. Though these tests are costly, they help in selecting the most suitable candidate for the job.

Advantages of Test:

(i) Objective Assessment:

Tests provide better objective criteria than any other method. Subjectivity of every type is almost eliminated.

(ii) Proper Assessment:

Tests provide a basis for finding out the suitability of candidates for various jobs.

The mental capability, aptitude, liking and interests of the candidates enable the selectors to find out whether a person is suitable for the job for which he is a candidate.

(iii) Selection of Better Persons:

The aptitude, temperament and adjustability of candidates are determined with the help of tests. This enables their placement on the jobs where they will be most suitable. It will also improve their efficiency and job satisfaction.

(iv) Uniform Basis:

Tests provide a uniform basis for comparing the performance of applicants. Same tests are given to the candidates and their score will enable selectors to see their performance.

(v) Labour Turnover Reduced:

Proper selection of persons will also reduce labour turnover. If suitable persons are not selected, they may leave their job sooner or later. Tests are helpful in finding out the suitability of persons for the jobs. Interest tests will help in knowing the liking of applicants for different jobs. When a person gets a job according to his temperament and interest he would not leave it.

Limitations

(A) Tests cannot fully understand a candidate’s personality. At best, they can only differentiate between those who have scored above and below the cut off point. This limitation is, however, overcome by the proceedings of the further selection process.

(B) Some tests like lie detection tests are not advisable as they demoralize the candidates.

(C) Fear of Exposure:

Some persons may not submit to the tests for fear of exposure. They may be competent but may not like to be assessed through the tests. The enterprise may be deprived of the services of such personnel who are not willing to appear for the tests but are otherwise suitable for the concern.

(D) Tests are not always suitable measures of selection. A candidate may spoil his test but may still be suitable for the job.

(E) Wrong Use: The tests may not be properly used by the employees. Those persons who are conducting these tests may be biased towards certain persons. This will falsify the results of tests. Tests may also give unreliable results if used by incompetent persons.

Posting a job ad for a position that does not exist. There are a few reasons this may be done: to see what talent might be available in a potential new location; to attract passive candidates to build up a talent pipeline; to use up remaining postings in an expiring contract with an online jobs board, if only to collect resumes; to see if current employees will respond to a blind ad, indicating they are ready to jump ship; or to foster the idea that the company is growing and stable, rather than the opposite.

If, for any of these reasons, a job ad is posted when no open position actually exists, applicants, employees, clients and customers may be led to distrust the company or recruiter due to unethical practices. Reputations can be ruined quickly with a simple social media post; allowing only actual openings to be advertised will alleviate this risk.

Some ethical ways of researching talent availability in a new location include:

• Gathering demographic data. Do your research to find out about the education level, cost of living and unemployment rates in the area. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, local unemployment agencies and other government groups have this information available and will provide it at no cost.
• Talking to local business groups. The Chamber of Commerce, Rotary Club or other local business groups can provide information on the employment climate in the area you are considering.
• Reading local publications. These newspapers or journals can be a wealth of information, as they may discuss the local labor market or highlight growth or shrinkage among local industries. Review the sections in which the hiring and promotions of local employees are announced, to see where people are being hired and what types of positions are highlighted. Most of these sections also have listings of job openings in the area.
• Data mining resume databases. Sites like Monster or LinkedIn, where people can post resumes, will give you a good idea of talent availability in the local market. Use these resources not only to assess availability, but also to target top candidates if you choose to move forward.

Misrepresenting the duties or requirements of an open position. This generally occurs when a position is difficult to fill, or a recruiting quota needs to be met and desperation sets in. Promising more autonomy or authority than a position has can lead to an unhappy hire and even more cost to the employer when the new hire quickly leaves. The same holds true for hiring someone who is overqualified, or hiring someone who is underqualified and becomes overwhelmed and unproductive. To maintain ethical practices and integrity as a recruiter and for your company, be completely transparent with applicants about what the job they are applying for entails.

Unethical employee referral practices. While a popular and successful tool to hire quality candidates, employee referral programs can create ethical issues of which HR should be aware. These issues can arise when senior-level employees make a referral and expect a hire, regardless of merit; a referred candidate is hired, and there is a sense that the referring employee is indebted to the hiring manager for “doing him or her a favor”; and special interests, such as a client referral, carry weight over merit.

Unethical use of social media. There are certainly legal risks in discovering and using protected-status information (e.g., age, ethnicity or religion) against an applicant; there are also ethical concerns.

At its most flagrant, unethical behaviors include recruiters’ creating fake social media accounts to gain access to applicant profiles to mine private information about them and access their friends. Even when candidates are notified that you will be looking at their accounts and thus require them to provide social media passwords (not legal in some states), you’ve crossed a line into their private lives and accessed information that is not job-related and therefore should not be used against them. But what is seen cannot be unseen, so ethically and legally there are limits to using such information.

Some essential factors for businesses to consider for ethical recruiting:

• Never place misleading job advertisements: This includes misrepresenting the requirements of a particular position. It also refers to working conditions and the current or projected state of the organisation.
• Interview correctly to ensure proper matching: It is vital for agencies to interview candidates thoroughly to match them with the right job. This includes giving guidance to candidates and helping them understand the offer and its associated career implications.
• Treat all candidates equally: An important ethical factor, it is essential not to discriminate on the basis of gender, race, origin, religion or political views. Always review candidates based on their merits. It is critical for HR professionals to be honest, consistent and objective throughout the recruiting process.
• Solicit only information that is necessary: For instance, information like the city a candidate was born does not matter or have an impact when it comes to their ability to perform a certain role. Where they currently reside, however, does have implications of where they are able to commute to on a daily basis.
• Maintain confidentiality on the use and storage of candidate information: Confidentiality is essential. This includes obtaining the candidate’s consent to release their details to a specific client or for a specific position. Conduct yourself in a transparent fashion, ensuring that a candidate fully understands the possible risks involved if going to work for a competitor to their current employer.
• Never practice redirection: This is when a recruiter takes feedback from a hiring manager after a candidate’s interview and sends it to the candidate. If the candidate can address the hiring manager’s worries, it increases the likelihood that they’ll be chosen for the job and the recruiter will secure their fee. It may be effective, but it’s highly unethical.
• Inform candidates appropriately of the selection decision: Always let a candidate know within a specified and communicated time-frame whether they got the job or not. Do not leave them hanging.

Job redesign tailor’s employee positions to an organization’s current functions and needs.  During times of change, job redesign ensures that organizational needs are filled by proficient employees.  Job redesign can involve something as simple as adding a single job function, or it can be as complex as completely overhauling the position.

Job redesign can also involve the addition of new tasks to provide employees with variety and challenges.  This can contribute to increased employee satisfaction in workplace experience.  The process can also be purposed to holistically balance the tasks and abilities of a group of employees.

Restructuring the elements including tasks, duties and responsibilities of a specific job in order to make it more encouraging and inspiring for the employees or workers is known as job redesigning. The process includes revising, analyzing, altering, reforming and reshuffling the job-related content and dimensions to increase the variety of assignments and functions to motivate employees and make them feel as an important asset of the organization. The main objective of conducting job redesigning is to place the right person at the right job and get the maximum output while increasing their level of satisfaction.

Process

• Revising the Job Content: Job redesigning process involves recollecting and revising job-related information to determine the inconsistency between person and the job.
• Analyzing Job-related Information: Once the job analyst is through with recollecting and revising the job content, analyzing the discrepancies is the next step. It is done to determine the hindrances in performing job-related tasks and duties and investigate why an employee is not able to deliver the expected output.
• Altering the Job Elements: The next step is to amend the job elements. It may include cut back on extra responsibilities or addition of more functions and a higher degree of accountability. The basic aim of altering the job content is to design a job in such a manner that encourages employees to work harder and perform better.
• Reformation of Job Description and Specification: After altering the job elements, a job analyst needs to reform the job description and specification in order to make sure that the worker placed at a particular place is able to deliver what is expected of him.
• Reshuffling the Job-related Tasks and Duties: Next is to reallocation of new or altered tasks and functions to employees. It may be done by rotating, enriching, enlarging and engineering the job. The idea is to motivate the performers while increasing their satisfaction level.

Advantages

• Creates the best match between an employee’s abilities/experience and a position
• Establishes lean organizational efficiency
• Increases employee productivity and workplace satisfaction
• Increases employee retention
• Enhances the Quality of Work-Life: Job redesigning motivates the employees and enhances the quality of their work life. It increases their on-the-job productivity and encourages them to perform better.
• Increases Organization’s and Employees’ Productivity: Altering their job functions and duties makes employees much comfortable and adds to their satisfaction level. The unambiguous job responsibilities and tasks motivate them to work harder and give their best output. Not only this, it also results in increased productivity of an organization.
• Brings the Sense of Belongingness in Employees: Redesigning job and allowing employees to do what they are good at creates a sense of belongingness in them towards the organization. It is an effective strategy to retain the talent in the organization and encouraging them to carry out their responsibilities in a better fashion.
• Creates a Right Person-Job Fit: Job Redesigning plays an important role in creating a right person-job fit while harnessing the full potential of employees. It helps organization as well as employees in achieving their targets or goals.

Job redesign is an important part of optimizing an organization’s workforce, especially if:

• There has been a major shift in an organization’s use of technology.
• Employees are being transferred from one department to another.
• Employees are taking on additional job functions after organizational or departmental right-sizing.

In situations like those described above, the following process is most effective:

• Competency mapping of current employee functions
• Functional analysis of new employee functions
• Gap analysis of current and new employee functions
• Reassign job functions elsewhere, as necessary
• Identification of custom training to bridge the employee’s transition

As opposed to direct marketing, where advertisers send the same message to everyone and expect a large portion of those people to reject the message behavioral marketing takes online information and uses it to tailor the message to the user.

Behavioral targeting uses web analytics, computer applications and cookies, browsing and search history, and IP addresses, to create user profiles of individual consumers. With that information, the website’s ad server will then generate relevant and targeted content or advertisements that appeals to their interests.

Response rate is a measurement of the amount of people who respond to a certain call-to-action. When marketers want to solicit a response from consumers, they will distribute an offer to the consumers. The consumers who respond to the offer are calculated into the metric.

Measuring response rate has multiple applications in marketing, depending on the marketer’s need. The measurement could be based on the amount of people who responded to a marketing survey, the amount of people who filled out a contact form asking for information, or any other action that requires a response.

Marketers should actively encourage recipients to respond to the offers. Response rates that are too low can result in a sample bias, thus skewing the results and producing inaccurate results for marketers. Careful attention should be paid to eliminating any additional factors that might produce biased results.

Keep in mind that although response rate is a helpful metric to know, it can be misleading as well. Rates can vary dramatically depending on the demographics of an area, the relevance of the offer to the target market, and how compelling the offer is. In some cases, a high response rate can be related to unsatisfactory results, whereas a low rate could produce results that are very positive.

The rate of sales within a retail market is calculated by taking the value sales of the product, dividing by the average number of stores selling, multiplied with the numeric distribution, divided by the weighted distribution.

The calculation looks like this:

(Value Sales / average # of stores selling) * (numerical distribution / weighted distribution).

So, what does the rate of sales actually tell us? It tells us, as the name implies, the sales rotation of any given product(s), in a retailer, in a defined period of time such as moving annual total.

Manufacturers of FMCG products can for example use this fact to gauge whether or not a certain product is given the right amount of priority by a retailer.

It’s one thing to look at value sales on any given period and comparing this to the previous year or previous period to see if sales go up or down, but if we would like to know how a particular SKU is performing, irrespective of the distribution of the product within the retailer(s) (to a certain extent), we would also need to look at the sales rotation, i.e., how fast is this product actually selling when it’s on the shelf at a given retailer in a defined period of time. This can then in turn be used by the manufacturers to show which products should be prioritized from the retailer side, as a product with a higher rate of sales will all else being equal equate to higher sales and thus drive more value to the category.

It can also be used to measure the effectiveness of each retailer compared with each other to see who’s performing best and thus who should be given priority by the manufacturer.

Most of the largest online retailers and social-media sites already use behavioral marketing technique as do the companies that purchase ads from those sites. However, behavioral marketing isn’t only used purely to “sell you stuff.” By targeting ads to specific needs, companies can also provide goods and services that will not only fill consumer closets, but improve their quality of life. For example, a pharmaceutical company can create and implement advertising that encourages people to use and continue taking a new cancer or hyperactivity drug.

Because behavioral marketing is extremely targeted, this strategy doesn’t work as well with products that appeal to a more general audience. Additionally, because of the data being used, privacy issues and legislation to address those issues will affect the approaches used by marketers going forward. However, when used properly, behavioral targeting can be a very effective way to reach the right customers with the right products and services.

Marketing communications must do more than just promote your company, products or services. Advertising messages, promotions, social media and public relations efforts should support your overall marketing strategy, including your brand-management strategy. Understanding how you can evaluate the effectiveness of your efforts can help you spend your marketing budget more efficiently.

The final stage of the promotional planning process is monitoring, evaluating, and controlling the promotional program. It is important to determine how well the promotional program is meeting communications objectives and helping the firm accomplish its overall marketing goals and objectives. The promotional planner wants to know not only how well the promotional program is doing but also why. For example, problems with the advertising program may lie in the nature of the message or in a media plan that does not reach the target market effectively. The manager must know the reasons for the results in order to take the right steps to correct the program.

This final stage of the process is designed to provide managers with continual feedback concerning the effectiveness of the promotional program, which in turn can be used as input into the planning process. Information on the results achieved by the promotional program is used in subsequent promotional planning and strategy development.

Perspective and Organization Traditional approaches to teaching advertising, promotional strategy, or marketing communications of This Text courses have often treated the various elements of the promotional mix as separate functions. As a result, many people who work in advertising, sales promotion, direct marketing, or public relations tend to approach marketing communications problems from the perspective of their particular specialty. An advertising person may believe marketing communications objectives are best met through the use of media advertising; a promotional specialist argues for a sales promotion program to motivate consumer response; a public relations person advocates a PR campaign to tackle the problem. These orientations are not surprising, since each person has been trained to view marketing communications problems primarily from one perspective.

In the contemporary business world, however, individuals working in marketing, advertising, and other promotional areas are expected to understand and use a variety of marketing communications tools, not just the one in which they specialize. Ad agencies no longer confine their services to the advertising area. Many are involved in sales promotion, public relations, direct marketing, event sponsorship, and other marketing communications areas. Individuals working on the client or advertiser side of the business, such as brand, product, or promotional managers, are developing marketing programs that use a variety of marketing communications methods.

This text views advertising and promotion from an integrated marketing communications perspective. Shall examine all the promotional-mix elements and their roles in an organization’s integrated marketing communications efforts. Although media advertising may be the most visible part of the communications program, understanding its role in contemporary marketing requires attention to other promotional areas such as the Internet and interactive marketing, direct marketing, sales promotion, public relations, and personal selling. Not all the promotional-mix areas are under the direct control of the advertising or marketing communications manager. For example, personal selling is typically a specialized marketing function outside the control of the advertising or promotional department. Likewise, publicity/public relations is often assigned to a separate department. All these departments should, however, communicate to coordinate all the organization’s marketing communications tools.

The purpose of this book is to provide you with a thorough understanding of the field of advertising and other elements of a firm’s promotional mix and show how they are combined to form an integrated marketing communications program. To plan, develop, and implement an effective IMC program, those involved must understand marketing, consumer behavior, and the communications process. The first part of this book is designed to provide this foundation by examining the roles of advertising and other forms of promotion in the marketing process. Examine the process of market segmentation and positioning and consider their part in developing an IMC strategy. They also discuss how firms organize for IMC and make decisions regarding ad agencies and other firms that provide marketing and promotional services.

Then focus on consumer behavior considerations and analyze the communications process. Discuss various communications models of value to promotional planners in developing strategies and establishing goals and objectives for advertising and other forms of promotion. Also consider how firms determine and allocate their marketing communications budget.

After laying the foundation for the development of a promotional program, this text will follow the integrated marketing communications planning model presented. Examine each of the promotional-mix variables, beginning with advertising. Our detailed examination of advertising includes a discussion of creative strategy and the process of developing the advertising message, an overview of media strategy, and an evaluation of the various media (print, broadcast, and support media). The discussion then turns to the other areas of the promotional mix: direct marketing, interactive/Internet marketing, sales promotion, public relations/publicity, and personal selling. Our examination of the IMC planning process concludes with a discussion of how the promotional program is monitored, evaluated, and controlled. Particular attention is given to measuring the effectiveness of advertising and other forms of promotion.