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Unit 9: RecruitmentRecruitment involves everything related to finding the right candidates for particular jobs. It can be undertaken by a company’s own HR / personnel department or the function can be outsourced, e.g. to a specialist recruitment agency. In the latter case, the agency generally advertises the job in the media, sorts the responses, identifies potential candidates and provides the client with a shortlist of the best qualified candidates. Sometimes the agency approaches the candidates on behalf of the client, interviews them and then recommends who the company should take on, before handling all negotiations leading up to the start of employment. This process is often called ‘search and selection’. This unit looks only at the internal processes involved in recruitment. HR departments are usually involved in:• drawing up job and person specifications (the skills, experience, qualifications and qualities required or desired for a vacant position)• advertising vacancie s• processing CVs (curriculum vitae—UK / resumé –US)• screening applicants’ CVs and cover letters andselecting candidates for interview• setting up and carrying out interviews in line withcompany / legal policies and procedures• conducting other selection procedures (e.g.assessments to see applicants’ real strengths andweaknesses)• negotiating and drawing up contracts and terms andconditions• putting the chosen applicant(s) onto the payroll.The unit focuses on how one HR department dealt with a huge recruitment challenge: the luxury Las Vegas hotel. The Bellagio recruited 9,600 workers in 24 weeks. It achieved this by developing a streamlined online application system and carrying out 30-minute behavioral interviews.Warming up1personnel; candidates; curriculum vitae; resumé; payrollScripts：Job interviews can generally be divided into three main types. The first is what I would call the ‘traditional interview’. This is usually just a series of standard questions about qualifications, work experience, knowledge and expectations. So what you have here is basically a list of quite straightforward questions, you know, like ‘What duties did you have in your previous job?’ This is still the model for a lot of interviews today. In my view it’s not the best to select staff. In fact I would say that it’s very often quite inappropriate.Then there’s the ‘case interview’ which is particularly challenging. What happens here is that the interviewer presents a problem and then follows this with a series of questions to find out how the candidate would approach the problem. To give you an idea, it might go something like this: ‘Company X wants to increase the number of university graduates that it hires every year by 50 per cent without exceeding its current budget, which is $2m. What would you advise them to do?’ Now this puts the candidate in a pretty uncomfortable position because they’re really being asked to do several things—to demonstrate that they can analyze the problem logically, formulate appropriate questions and communicate effectively with the interviewer. So it’s a pretty stressful form of interview.The third type is what’s known as the ‘behavioral interview’. It’s designed to find out how candidates actually behave in certain situations. The questions are usually based on anecdotes from the candidate’s own past. They’re designed to find out about how the candidates handled tricky situations and relationships in the past. A typical question might be ‘Can you give me an example of a situation where you had to follow orders that you didn’t agree with?’ Now that puts the pressure on the candidate because they have to find a good example and they have to do the talking, so it opens up a lot of information and the interviewer gets to see more of the person who’s sitting opposite.3Open question. Answers may involve:Self-Motivated; Hard working; decisive and effective learner; team-working; Helping others; Honesty; Ethical; Disciplined and punctual…Understanding the text11D 2B 3E 4C 5A2124 weeks: the time available for recruiting new staff2740: the interviews that were carried out320%: the percentage of applicants that were weeded out when applicants completed their online application form430 minutes: the standard length of interview58%: the percentage of applicants that were rejected when their CVs were checked6$1.9m: the fund were saved through this standardized recruitment process31background check and drug test2It could eliminate the files that managers usually keep at their desks3The new approach of employment is a success.4open question. Answers with reasonable explanations are acceptable.5open question.Language work1Applicants:1 appointment2 identity3 computer4 application5 checkout6 interview7 testThe HR team:1deadline 2system 3 screen 4 train 5 conduct 6 backgrounds 7 files22 challenge / challenge / challenger3 interview / interview / interviewee4 design / design / designer5 assess / assessment / assessor6 communicate / communication / communicator7 appoint / appointment / appointee32B 3E 4B 5A 6D42 in3 for 4from 5 to 6 for52 cover letter3 background4 small talk5 database6 payroll61Going online would spare human resources from the process.2As long as you completed the application, your answer would be proceeded to a checkout desk for the review of a staff member.3In the process, files that used to occupy managers’ desks could be eli minated.4Therefore, an electronic personnel file was developed to help transmit the application database to the new-hire database.5However, you should think in a global and strategical way if you want to have a voice.71我告诉经理们，这一技术将给予他们一直想要的雇佣解聘权，以及他们鲜少得到的完整权力。
Unit 9Holidays:A Step to AcculturationHolidays are very important for us :they “glue” us to people around us by being a common experience, a socially meaningful historical event or a cultural or religions celebration. It is our common territory, the ground we all stand on.When dinner or for gifts, we feel secure and connected.But what happens if we leave our history and cultural traditions behind before we acquire a set of new ones and we find ourselves in a cultural and social vacuum? When we immigrate to a new country, our body is physically transported, but how about our soul? It seems to be wandering in-between the worlds, looking for something to hook to. This hook, in my experience, can be a holiday——a cultural event that would make the click happen.A holiday can create the intellectual context for learning, and it is through this learning that the emotional integration might occur.Striving for cultural and emotional meaning, for the sense of feeling connected in order to survive emotionally, to fill in the void brought about by landing in a different country, I tried to become part of this country by joining its holidays.The first year in the United States, when Thanksgiving was approaching, I decided to buy a turkey and to celebrate like everybody else. It seemed to me that I would “feel” the connection to people and to this land by stuffing myself with turkey (a delicacy back in Russia). However, the turkey and the cranberry sauce shared with a couple of our Russian friends did not bring about a miracle. I left the table physically stuffed, yet strangely empty.I was teaching “survival English”to new immigrants in a business school program. My instinct as a teacher was to use the material(close to the cultural reality) both my students and were trying to embrace. So I found some very simple reading about the history of Thanksgiving (perhaps in my daughter’s textbook) and brought it to cultural that first year of my teaching it to my students. We learned about American cultural that first year of my teaching in the U.S. as a distant purely academic,”textbookish” content. We did some vocabulary exercises and exchanged a few turkey recipes. The words were barren of cultural and emotional meaning.There is no better learning than teaching—and starting from that first years, I would enrich my teaching materials about Thanksgiving and expand the assignments to the students.Every year my students and I learned about the Pilgrims and the Indians, about Plymouth and discussing European and American history. Gradually, the feast of corn turkey, and cranberry acquired its historical, geographic and social-economic meaning. The etymology of the word “turkey”would become a cross-linguistic and cross-cultural adventure, a glance into my classroom languages and history, and an arena for anthropological and linguistic research. Sometimes my students would throw a multicultural Thanksgiving party, where, along with the traditional American turkey and vegetables, a variety of Eastern-European, Caribbean and Asian dishes would be displayed and enjoyed.Every year, along with my students or on my own, I discovered more and moreabout American history and of the history of native Americans. With my traveling around the country, my reading of American literature, meeting with real people, trying out real food , I was learning more and more about American history. Every year the Thanksgiving story helped me better articulate the beautiful myth reflecting the historical reality.With time and learning, I left I belonged to that myth as well as other immigrants, following the Pilgrims. The more I learned about American Indians, the more I felt detached from the image I had formed of them back in Russia. Gradually the image of brave but wild warriors got substituted by the image of the real masters of this land ,who disappeared with their rich mysterious culture, only to give people like me their hospitality turkey ,corn and cranberries. As an outsider, I felt the story was an attempt to cover what really happened after the turkey had been eaten, but as an insider , I was grateful for the happy ending of the story ,because this legend helped perpetuate the American hospitality and openness to newcomers, which I myself had benefited from. I also felt that the story and the celebration, despite its Hollywood-like polt , makes Americans feel proud about their historical beginning, which was paradoxically someone else’s ending. I strongly felt American: simultaneously feeling both like the Pilgrims and the Indians.Thanksgiving has become my holiday in essence and meaning , just like what it means to most American families: the connection we strive for. It makes us feel at home ,in a familiar environment rather than an alien one,and which creates the feeling fo security and of peace—an absolutely necessary emotional foundation of feeling of well-being. It is this sense of sitting at a dinner table with our lived ones ,lighting the candles, cooking an apple pie , drinking tea and smelling the familiar kitchen smells that we had been brought to life with ,raised with ,which come along with the primary sense of being alive.I feel all this now ,discovering how my intellectual knowledge about this country has integrated my being via emotional channels. Perhaps we always start with the intellectual: reading , reflecting ,and communicating our reflections to other people. The cultural information, along with the motivation to survive emotionally, to get out of the immigrant crisis and of acculturation-related depression, of loneliness and of isolation ,works through the mind to the heart and together with real food and food for the soul ,becomes the source of release and relief. We feel in place and we share experiences. We have arrived. We are home.。
