How much are new donors worth? Making donor recruitment investment decisions based on lifetime value analysis

Donor lifetime value analysis can be an extremely powerful tool in not‐for‐profit marketing. Many organisations are yet to use this tool to its full value because of practical difficulties with definition and implementation. This paper outlines how Sight Savers International has defined lifetime value and the limitations and problems that needed to be overcome to use the technique effectively as a means of informing decisions about new donor recruitment. The paper introduces the concept of time‐based lifetime value and how it can be developed to measure return on investment of each type of donor recruitment activity. The results of the analysis as applied to Sight Savers are shown; these reveal that some current assumptions, such as that which says cold direct mail produces the best donor lifetime value, may need revising. Copyright © 2000 Henry Stewart Publications     

Recruitment and selection services: Efficiency and competitive reasons in the outsourcing of HR practices

While human resource (HR) activities have traditionally been performed internally, the outsourcing of HR practices is a rapidly increasing phenomenon. The accelerated rate of HR outsourcing also corresponds to a sweeping change in which non-transactional activities, such as recruitment, selection and training, are among the most outsourced HR practices. This article investigates the outsourcing decisions of recruiting and selection (R&S). It develops a predictive model based on efficiency drivers, rooted in transaction cost economy (TCE), and competitive motivations, derived from the resource-based view. The model has been tested in a sample of 276 medium and large enterprises in two specific contexts: the outsourcing of administrative R&S practices (job advertisement and pre-screening) and that of the more strategic R&S practices (colloquia and selection). Findings confirm the relevance of both categories of predictors, but they reveal how efficiency motivations are more important for the decisions to outsource administrative R&S practices while competitive issues matter more for the strategic side of R&S activity. Theoretical and managerial implications are offered on the basis of such evidence.     

A study of HRM and recruitment and selection policies and practices in Taiwan

In this paper, the authors present and discuss the findings of a survey of human resource management (HRM) and recruitment and selection policies and practices in a sample of manufacturing industry in Taiwan. The results indicate that there is a general desire among HR professionals in participant companies that HRM policies are integrated with corporate strategy and that HRM should be involved in decision making at board level. Evidence was also obtained that some HRM decisions are shared between line management and HR specialists and that line managers had a particularly influential role in decisions regarding recruitment and selection, training and development, and workforce expansion/reduction. There was also some evidence supporting an assertion that certain recruitment and selection practices were culturally sensitive and this was supported by evidence of association between recruitment and selection practices and country of ownership.     

Publish or peer-rich? The role of skills and networks in hiring economics professors

This paper analyzes the determinants of success at the concours d'agrégation en sciences économiques. This is a centralized hiring procedure through which professors of economics are selected in France. Using detailed data from all concours held between 1984 and 2003, we focus on the role of the candidates' publication records (number and quality of articles) and networks (defined as professional links between candidates and the jury members who take the recruitment decisions). Both sets of variables have statistically significant effects on the likelihood of getting hired. The effect of network connections is important in the sense that a substantial improvement of the publication record is needed to compensate for not being linked to the jury.     

Aiding and Abetting Employer Discrimination: The Job Applicant's Role

Despite the complex nature of discrimination in employment, antidiscrimination legislation in most countries has placed almost exclusive responsibility on one party, the employer, who may base employment decisions on illegal grounds, by using personal information (such as age, gender, marital status, ethnicity, etc.) provided by job applicants. This study examined 107 real résumés from Australian managerial applicants to determine how much personal information is provided in résumés. It was found that although employers and recruitment consultants are prohibited from seeking personal information from applicants, this information is often either provided directly or indirectly by applicants in their résumés. Thus this paper suggests that job applicants aid and abet employer discrimination in the selection process. Methods to prevent or minimize discrimination in the recruitment and selection phases of the employment process are suggested.     

FINANCIAL EDUCATION AND BEHAVIORAL FINANCE: NEW INSIGHTS INTO THE ROLE OF INFORMATION IN FINANCIAL DECISIONS

Recent empirical evidence based on surveys and experimental activities within the fields of behavioral finance and financial education has offered economists new empirically based insights into how individuals use information in making financial decisions. Specifically, the importance of information in financial decisions may be reduced or eliminated by psychological aspects of the individual, such as a state of overconfidence that is individual or shared with a group, or by the individual's limited ability to process complex and abundant information. This paper aims to complement this emerging body of literature by studying how individuals perceive and process information when making financial decisions. We review these contributions and suggest a number of broad guidelines that can provide a framework for future discussion of this topic within financial decision theory.     

Selling prices and profits: what survey data tell about firms’ rationality

This paper states that the strong biases found in survey expectations do not necessarily distort economic decisions. An econometric analysis of price and profit data suggests that Swiss manufacturers do not base their production decisions on the forecasts they supply to the surveying institution. Instead, production decisions are based on data of past prices. This suggests that in their production management, firms make adjustments for biased marketing projections of selling prices. However, the practice of these adjustments is not optimal since it neglects the valuable information contained in these price forecasts. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Partnerships and the private recruitment industry

This article, based on a postal survey and qualitative interview‐based research, examines the relationship between major private recruitment bureaux and their clients in the UK, with particular attention to the recruitment and selection of temporary workers. The private recruitment industry is growing and large bureaux are seeking closer partnership arrangements with clients. Contracts for labour services are being developed on a 'preferred' supplier basis – similar in type to the approach taken for the purchase or supply of goods or components. However, formal preferred supplier contracts with temporary work bureaux were used by only a minority of clients, usually larger organisations or those having projects or workplaces with high volume demand. While such bureaux seek models of relational contracting or partnering, many clients prefer less fully engaged or 'semi‐distanced' relations facilitated by the informal dimensions of inter‐organisational contacts.     

ENVIRONMENT, ORGANIZATION AND EFFECTIVENESS: A BIOGRAPHICAL APPROACH[1]

Answers to the question of what makes an organization effective have proved elusive despite more than 20 years of intensive theorizing and research. Yet the search for answers, which gained momentum with Lawrence and Lorsch's (1969) Organization and Environment, clearly has had salutary effects on students of organizations and their work. This paper offers an approach to analysing organizations explicitly based on two of those benefits. The first is the shift toward a more dynamic orientation for explaining organizational configurations and outcomes. The second is the identification of strategic decisionmaking as the key link between organizational environment, structures, and effectiveness. By merging these two, we construct a biographical approach to the study of organizations. This approach sees organizations as evolving through time in response to, or in anticipation of, both external and internal forces. We view effectiveness as the outcome of a variety of decisions taken by one or more groups of organizational actors - elites or coalitions - in the context of bounded rationalities and environmental and structural constraints. So decision processes underpin observed configurations of environmental and structural features and link these configurations to effectiveness. An organization's biography - the pattern of its evolution - can be conceptualized as a succession of decisions and their consequences, with some decisions having a major long-term influence on the direction taken by the organization and its effectiveness, while others have but an incremental influence. This article is an initial effort to make concrete our ideas. The opening section discusses organizational decision-making and organizational effectiveness. This is the core of our approach: a basis for categorizing organizational decisions and in particular for singling out those which can be regarded as strategic. It is our contention that significant decisions vary across organizations and that it will embrace rather than ignore history and context. And ultimately, it will enhance our understanding of organizational effectiveness.     

The challenge of recruiting control groups. An experiment of different recruitment models in the control group of a clinical psychological postal survey

Recruitment of a large and reliable control group is a challenge in psychological survey based research. The effect of recruitment styles and age on response-rate, data quality, and individual differences were investigated in a control group for a postal survey of elderly bereaved people. This study was a direct reaction to the first recruitment attempt that had a 10% response rate. This study consisted of four groups of randomly selected elderly married people (65–81 years) receiving a postal questionnaire measuring depression, social support, coping style, adult attachment, life satisfaction, and personality factors. All groups were exposed to a set of general initiatives (customized introduction letter with university letterhead; self-addressed, prepaid envelope included; personally directed letter signed by the researcher; an assurance of confidentiality). Three groups were exposed to different specific initiatives (short non-sensitive questionnaire, recorded response, and monetary incentive independent of response) to increase the response-rate. The results indicated that general initiatives and information letters apparently increased the response-rate from 10 to 31%. Monetary incentive had the highest response-rate (51%), good data quality, and no sampling bias in individual differences. This method can be highly recommended in future control group recruitment.     

Individual job‐choice decisions and the impact of job attributes and recruitment practices: A longitudinal field study

The present research is intended to contribute to the understanding of how job‐choice decisions are made and the role of effective and ineffective recruiting practices in that process. The issues are examined by tracking job seekers through the job search and choice process. At multiple points in the process, structured interviews are used to elicit information from the job seekers pertaining to how they are making their decision and what factors play a role. Results provide theoretical and practical insights into the organizational and job attributes important to job choice, as well as how specific recruiting practices may exert a significant influence, positive or negative, on job‐choice decisions. For example, our findings reinforced the importance of providing job seekers the opportunity to meet with multiple (and high‐level) organizational constituents, impressive site‐visit arrangements, and frequent and prompt follow‐up. Also, imposing a deadline (i.e., “exploding offer”) showed little effect on job‐choice decisions. Recommendations for recruitment practice and continued research are provided. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Pledger modelling: Help the Aged case study

• The recruitment of pledgers (as a proxy for potential legators) to charitable organisations plays a vital role in their continued success, and as a percentage of all fundraising income generated it can represent substantial proportions. However, of all the ‘donation asks’ made of supporters, asking for a legacy is the most difficult. Therefore, it is important that the target audience should be as well researched and highly targeted as possible.
• Help the Aged had reached the stage where decisions need to be made about its future marketing in order to protect longer-term income. The findings of this legacy targeting project were to feed into communication programmes, direct marketing, and the overall legacy marketing strategy.
• The key objective was to identify the best prospects to mail a legacy ask to, across the supporter database, with the likelihood that they are going to pledge as a result.
• It was found that whilst tailored data analysis comes at a price, the average value of a legacy justifies the cost of using sophisticated targeting tools. However, because of the pledge-to-legacy time lapse, there will always be issues with measuring any long-term return on investment (ROI). Nonetheless, pledgers have to be taken on their word for the purpose of testing (and subsequent rollouts). Pledge data should be tested and the outcomes should inform legacy marketing. However, as mentioned above, pledgers necessarily need to be taken on their word and therefore, formulating models based on the type and/or value of pledges is not recommended.

Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Who Will We Recruit? Targeting Deep‐ and Surface‐Level Diversity with Human Resource Policy Advertising

Research on targeted recruitment has focused on targeting applicants with surface‐level attributes such as underrepresented demographic groups. The present study extends targeted recruitment research by examining how advertising human resource policies might be useful for targeting both surface‐ and deep‐level attributes. Specifically, the current study uses an experimental design to examine the impact of work‐family, diversity, and employee development policies on the job‐pursuit intentions of working adults in the United States. We examined surface‐ (demographic characteristics; e.g., race) and deep‐level differences (attitudes or values; e.g., diversity values) as predictors of whether participants intend to pursue jobs with firms advertising these human resource (HR) policies. Deep‐level differences consistently predicted job‐pursuit intentions for all three HR policies, but only marginal support was obtained for surface‐level variables as predictors. Findings suggest that targeted recruitment based on deep‐level attributes may be more successful than targeted recruitment based on surface‐level factors.     

The Determinants of Price Adjustments in Retail Supermarkets

This paper examines the determinants of price adjustment decisions by supermarkets to increase or decrease prices for 11 different food categories and evaluates the characteristics of these firms that influence these decisions. We use a unique dataset to analyze firm variables and industry variables and their impact on price adjustment in supermarket stores. The study contributes to the price adjustment literature by identifying determinants of price behavior by stores and product category. We find that the rationale for increasing prices differs from that for decreasing prices, retailers make different adjustment decisions based on product category, and market‐level controls have little impact. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Statistical methods for some simple disclosure limitation rules

To guard the confidentiality of information provided by respondents, statistical offices apply disclosure limitation techniques. An often applied technique is to ensure that there are no categories for which the population frequency is presumed to be small (‘rare’ categories). This is attained by recoding, top-coding or setting values to ‘unknown’. Since population frequencies are usually not available, the decision that a category is rare is often based on intuitive considerations. This is a time consuming process, involving many decisions of the disclosure limitation practitioners. In this paper it will be explored to what extent the sample frequencies can be used to make such decisions. This leads to a procedure which enables to automatically scan a data set for rare category combinations, whereby ‘rare’ is defined by the disclosure limitation policy of the statistical office.     

Analysts' utilization of historical earnings information

This study examines whether security analysts (in)efficiently utilize the information contained in past series of annual and quarterly earnings in producing earnings forecasts. To do so, it investigates whether equal-weighted combinations of security analysts' forecasts with forecasts from statistical models based on historical earnings are superior, both in terms of being a better surrogate for the market's expectations of earnings and of accuracy, to forecasts from either one of these two sources. The empirical findings indicate that, although analysts' forecasts are superior to forecasts from statistical models, performance can be improved—both in terms of accuracy and also of being a better surrogate for market earnings expectations—by combining analysts' forecasts with forecasts from statistical models based on past quarterly earnings. Improvements in proxying for market earnings expectations were obtained even when analysts' forecasts made in June of the forecast year were used in the combinations. An implication of these findings is that investors can improve their investment decisions by using an average of the mean analysts' forecasts and the forecast produced by a time-series model of quarterly earnings in their investment decisions.     

Pathways through trusteeship: Responding to the trustee recruitment crisis

Getting on Board 2017 suggests that the recruitment of trustees to the Board of Trustees (henceforth volunteer trustees) by charities in the United Kingdom is in a state of crisis. This report and a range of other stakeholders offer advice and guidance about recruitment, but attention to what motivates individuals to become trustees is lacking. Drawing upon the Pathways Through Participation framework , we argue that an important part of addressing the crisis in trustee recruitment is to consider the motivations of volunteer trustees in tandem with their resources and triggers for volunteering. We draw upon a study of 14 volunteer trustees of learning disability charities to explore how a critical understanding of volunteer trusteeship as a pathway through participation provides a full and rounded picture of trustee recruitment. Building on other research on volunteer recruitment and markets, we argue that recruitment can be improved when charities better understand what motivates their volunteer trustees. We recommend that charities consider trusteeship as a pathway through participation as part of their recruitment practices.     

Screening‐oriented recruitment messages: Antecedents and relationships with applicant pool quality

The ability of firms to attract qualified job applicants is a critical component of the human resource management process. However, while a large body of research has examined the relationship between firm recruitment practices and applicant pool attributes, very little research has investigated what factors are associated with organizational decision makers' utilization of specific recruitment tactics. We draw on labor economics, sociological, and agency theoretical perspectives to make predictions regarding the use of screening‐oriented recruitment messages in actual web‐based job advertisements. Results suggest that perceptions of labor supply, recruiting firm reputation, and the use of quality‐based compensation incentives are associated with use of screening‐oriented messages, which in turn are associated with applicant pool quality. These findings hold important theoretical insights into the factors shaping firm recruitment activity and provide practical strategic implications for managing firm recruitment objectives. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.