No abstract

Today's knowledge economy very much depends on the value created by the human resource of an organisation. In such a highly competitive environment, organisations have started to pay much attention to the recruitment and selection process, as employees form their main asset. However, the critical factors involved in the employee selection process is not well studied. Previous studies on the recruitment and selection process have been performed mainly to study the performance of the employees and the criteria attracting the right talent leading to employee retention and organizational efficiency. The distinction of this paper is that it studies the existing recruitment and selection process adopted by tertiary and dual education sectors in both urban and regional areas within Australia. The purpose of this research is to conduct an empirical study to identify the critical aspects of the employee selection process that can influence the decision based on different perspectives of the participants such as, hiring members, successful applicants as well as unsuccessful applicants. Various factors such as feedback provision, interview panel participation and preparations, relevance of interview questions, duration and bias were analysed, and their correlations were studied to gain insights in providing suitable recommendations for enhancing the process.

With the rapid proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) into urban people’s everyday walk of life, the functions of smart cities are fast approaching to be embedded in every step of people’s life. Despite the concept of smart cities founded in the late 1990s, there has been limited growth until recent popularity due to the advancements of IoTs. However, there are many challenges, predominantly people-centric, that require attention for the realisation of smart cities and expected real-life success. In this paper, we intend to investigate the state-of-the-art focus of smart cities from three angles: infrastructure engineering, information technology and people-centric management. We adopt a mixed-methods analysis of currently published literature on the topic of smart cities. Our study attempts to draw attention to the need for developing smart cities with a holistic approach involving multiple perspectives rather than a siloed emphasis on technology alone. We highlight that the fields of specialisations such as information technology and infrastructure engineering in contributing to smart cities need a cross-domain holistic approach of managing people-centric service requirements for improving consumer satisfaction and sustainability.

With the latest advancements in information technologies, many organisations expect systems to provide effective support in the recruitment process and decision making. However, there is a lack of clarity on the dominant factors required for an effective recruitment system which can influence business outcomes. This paper aimed to identify the predominant factors in the employee selection process and the use of a management system for decision support. The empirical study consisted of a qualitative survey of 74 samples and a quantitative survey of 204 individual participants from 17 organisations coming from technical and further education (TAFE)/dual education (higher education and vocational education) sector members of the Victorian TAFE Association in Australia. Using commonly adopted exploratory factor analysis (EFA) of 38 variables, the data triangulation of the qualitative and quantitative analysis resulted in conformance of five dominant factors under three themes. We believe the results of the study offer actionable suggestions in developing an effective recruitment system and furthers the research in this field of study.