Recruitment and selection is the foundation of all other HR activity. Get it wrong and it doesn’t matter how good your development programme is, how well you motivate your staff, how you manage their performance, or even how well you reward them, you are always making up for that one bad decision.

It is also one of your principal points of contact with line managers: deliver a less than perfect performance there and your chances of being taken seriously as a strategic business partner are gone.

Get it right, however, and you can transform a mundane, everyday HR process into a chance to improve your organisation’s performance by improving the quality of the people you’re asking to deliver that performance. Do that, and your line managers and senior management colleagues will sit up and take notice.