Recruitment can be defined as a set of activities and practices used for the  primary purpose of legally identifying sufficient numbers and quality of people  fitting for a given purpose. It is carried out to provide an organisation with a  pool of qualified potential individuals’ from which judicious selection for the  most appropriate applicants can be made for filling vacancies in the  organisation.  A review of the HRM literature indicates that recruitment and selection are  regarded as integrated activities and where recruitment stops and selection  begins is a questionable point (Beardwell et al., 2004).  Nevertheless, for the  purpose of this work it is useful to differentiate between the two activities. As  defined above, numerous authors (Whitehill, 1991: Roberts, 2008; McCormack  and Scholarios, 2009) describe recruitment as a process of building a pool of  potentially qualified applicants. Whereas selection is seen as a set of activities  concerned with predicting which applicants will make the most appropriate  contribution to the organisation in view of the present and future human  resource requirements (Beardwell et al., 2004: McCormack and Scholarios,  2009).   Despite recruitment and selection being considered as integrated activities  unfortunately human resources literature discussions tend to neglect  recruitment and place greater emphasis on selection. In view of this  (McCormack and Scholarios, 2009) comment that the more effective an  organisation is at identifying and attracting a high quality profile of job  applicants, the less important  the selection stage of hiring becomes. Therefore  it can be suggested that an effective and agile recruitment strategy is the most  fundamental human resource function and if managed well can have a  significant impact on organisational performance and is critical to developing a  more agile competitive edge (Pilbeam and Corbridge, 2006: Evans et al, 2007).

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