Multilevel and Strategic Recruiting: Where Have We Been, Where Can We Go From Here?

Recruiting influences employees’ motivation, performance, and retention. Because an organization’s talent influences its capabilities, strategic execution, and competitive advantage, recruiting is a foundation of organizational performance. Strategic recruitment refers to recruitment practices that are connected across levels of analysis and aligned with the goals, strategies, context, and characteristics of the organization. It differs from traditional recruitment perspectives by explicitly connecting firm strategy and context to recruitment practices and activities within that firm. Strategic recruitment lies at the nexus of four important topics: resource-based theory, strategic human resource management, human capital, and levels of analysis. In this review, we first define strategic recruitment and explain its importance. Next, we briefly review why strategic recruitment is a critical yet underexplored area of research despite decades of research on strategic human resource management in general and recruitment in particular. Finally, we introduce a model that advances our understanding of strategic recruitment. We introduce two new concepts, horizontal strategic recruitment and vertical strategic recruitment, which connect to the ideas of horizontal and vertical alignment in the strategic human resource management literature but focus explicitly on the notion of strategic recruitment. This model highlights a variety of opportunities for future recruitment research relevant to resource-based theory, strategic human resource management, human capital, and levels of analysis.