Recruitment & Selection Process

Revise Recruitment & Selection Process for Business (Edexcel) 4BS1 (O Level) — revision notes and instant AI marking.

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Edexcel IGCSE Business

Recruitment & Selection Process

Big idea: Businesses have a whole toolkit — job types, documents, internal/external methods, and laws — to find and hire the right person for a job, fairly and legally.

Quick Summary

Types of employment — full-time, part-time, job sharing, temporary/casual, and flexible working patterns give businesses different ways to structure a role.
Recruitment vs Selection — recruitment attracts a pool of candidates; selection picks the best one from that pool.
The recruitment process follows five stages: Define → Source → Advertise → Receive applications → Selection.
Recruitment documents — person specification and job description are written by the employer; CVs and application forms are submitted by candidates.
Internal vs external recruitment — hiring from within the business vs bringing in someone new, each with distinct pros and cons.
Shortlisting and interviewing — narrowing a large pool down to a manageable, comparable list, then testing suitability through interview.
Legal controls — employment law protects workers on pay, safety, discrimination, absence rights, and dismissal.
Equal opportunities & discrimination — treating all candidates fairly regardless of protected characteristics like age, gender, race, religion, disability.
Minimum wage laws — vary hugely by country, and affect both employer costs and employee living standards.

1. Types of Employment

Not every job looks the same. A business choosing how to structure a role is a bit like choosing the right container for a liquid — pick the wrong shape and it either overflows (staff burn out, costs spiral) or there's wasted space (staff sit idle, money wasted on hours nobody needed). Let's go through the main "shapes" a job can take.

Full-time employment

This is the "standard" job — an employee works the total number of hours the company defines as full-time in a week, typically 35+ hours. Full-time workers are usually the backbone of a business: they get the most training investment, the most benefits, and the most job security, but they also cost the business the most per employee in wages and benefits combined.

Part-time employment

Someone working part-time might only do two or three days a week. It's more flexible for both sides — an employee might want fewer hours because of family, study, or another job; an employer might only need someone for part of the week (e.g. a shop that's busiest on weekends). Costco in the US, for example, requires part-time staff to work a minimum of 24 hours just to keep their employee benefits — a reminder that "part-time" doesn't mean "no strings attached" for either side.

Job sharing

Imagine one full-time role, sliced like a pizza, and split between two (or more) people, each working part-time. A classic example is a split-shift job share: Worker A covers 8am–1pm, Worker B covers 1pm–6pm — together they cover the same working day a single full-time employee would, but as two separate contracts.

Temporary and casual employment

Q1. A café wants to stay open 8am–6pm every day but doesn't want to pay one person for a 10-hour shift. Which type of employment arrangement would best solve this, and why?

Q2.