MAN4320 – Human Resource Recruitment and Selection is a 3-credit upper-division course on filling positions: defining what a job requires, attracting candidates, and choosing among them defensibly. Daytona State College titles it Recruitment and Selection.
Staffing is the human resource function with the clearest measurable consequences and the greatest legal exposure. Every selection decision is a prediction about future performance, and the course treats it that way — asking which selection methods actually predict job performance, how much, and whether the evidence supports what most organizations do. The honest answer is frequently that it does not: unstructured interviews, the most-used method in practice, are among the weaker predictors, while structured interviews and work-sample tests do considerably better.
Content covers strategic workforce planning and forecasting; job analysis — the foundation on which everything else rests, producing job descriptions and specifications; recruiting — internal and external sourcing, employer branding, job boards, social recruiting, employee referrals, and recruiting metrics; the legal framework — equal employment opportunity, adverse impact, the four-fifths rule, and the Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures; reliability and validity of selection procedures; selection methods — applications and résumés, cognitive ability and personality testing, work samples, assessment centers, and interviews; structured interviewing — behavioral and situational formats and scoring; background and reference checking, including Fair Credit Reporting Act obligations; drug testing; the job offer and negotiation; and onboarding and its effect on retention.
Offered at approximately 13 Florida institutions with bachelor's-level business, management, or human resource programs.
Florida's hospitality, healthcare, construction, and logistics sectors hire continuously and at volume, which makes recruiting a genuinely accessible entry point into HR. The SHRM-CP and HRCI aPHR/PHR certifications are the credentials employers recognize.
A current, Florida-specific requirement that national textbooks will not cover. Florida law requires private employers with 25 or more employees to use the federal E-Verify system to confirm the work authorization of new hires, with recordkeeping obligations and penalties for noncompliance. Public employers and their contractors have their own requirements. This sits alongside the federal Form I-9 obligation that applies to every employer regardless of size — the two are distinct and both apply. Anyone entering HR practice in Florida needs to know this precisely, and students should verify the current thresholds and procedures, since the requirement is relatively recent and has been amended.
This is the course's most useful and most ignored finding. Decades of validity research consistently show that structured interviews — the same job-related questions asked of every candidate, scored against defined anchors — predict job performance considerably better than the conversational interviews most managers prefer and believe they are good at. Structure also produces the documentation that defends a decision if it is challenged. A graduate who can build and run a structured interview process is immediately useful to an employer, and this is one of the few areas where the research answer and the practical answer point the same way.
Every defensible selection decision traces back to a documented job analysis: it establishes that the criteria are job-related and consistent with business necessity, which is the employer's defense when adverse impact is shown. It also determines essential functions under the ADA, which drives reasonable accommodation analysis. Students often treat job analysis as the boring first chapter; it is actually where the liability is decided.
Automated resume screening and AI-scored interviews are widespread and are drawing regulatory attention. The legal analysis is not new — a tool that produces adverse impact must still be job-related and validated, whoever or whatever built it — but vendors frequently cannot document validation, and employers remain liable for the tools they use. The EEOC has issued guidance on the point. Students should understand that "the algorithm decided" is not a defense.
Florida follows employment at will: absent a contract or a statutory protection, either party may end the relationship at any time for any lawful reason. This shapes offer letters — careless language can create an implied contract — and it makes documentation of the reason for a decision more important rather than less. It pairs directly with MAN4402 Employment Law, which develops the statutory exceptions.
The 4000-level number means junior or senior standing and, at most institutions, admission to the bachelor's program. Prerequisites commonly include a principles of management or human resource management course, frequently MAN3025 or MAN4301. Note that MAN2021 and MAN3025 are different numbers at different levels and are not interchangeable for upper-division requirements; verify locally.
Generated August 31, 2026 · Updated August 31, 2026