An organisation has extremely little, to no, control over its external environment, the aspects of which are too numerous to list. The external environment influences HRM practices, thus influencing HR activities, both directly and indirectly. In other words, an aspect of the organisation’s external environment may directly affect the processes of employee recruitment and selection through influencing HRM practices, but at the same time it will influence the organisation’s internal environment, hence affecting the processes through strategic alignment.
One major external environmental influence may be politics. The state of politics may affect the processes of employee recruitment and selection in various ways. For example, political instability has had a dramatic influence on the practices of employee recruitment in Algeria (Mellahi & Wood, 1996). This study addresses the impact the civil war has had on recruitment practices, among other things. An interesting discovery was that the lengthy political crisis led small and medium sized firms away from ‘rationalistic’, strategically driven practices and forced them into, what is referred to as, a ‘coping mode’. The ‘coping mode’ is reactive, as apposed to pro-active, fostering a ‘stay alive’ strategy; hence greatly affecting the management of human resources both directly and indirectly.