The manager concept and manager’s abilities in the process of human resources recruitment

Abstract

In this paper, we discuss the over-use of manager concept in the process of recruitment of human resources and the misalignment of managerial abilities of the future manager with the hierarchical level in the organization. We have resorted to an archival data analysis research strategy to analyse 228 job announcements for the recruitment of managers in Romania, regarding the topics mentioned above. We found that in almost 50% of announcements the manager concept was over-used by companies in our sample. In other words, the concept ‘manager’ was used in recruitment announcements in which there was not a management position. Likewise, we found that most companies required planning and organizing abilities, but they underappreciated the attention devoted to leadership and controlling/supervising abilities (in 57%, respectively 38% from cases). We also found that in 50% of announcements the human abilities were underappreciated by companies in our sample.