Assignment
According to the case, solve three given questions using references briefly.
The Planet Store, a chain store's competitive strategy is to sale superior quality products to differentiate the Planet Store properties, and to thereby increase the customer loyalty, and thus boost revenues and profitability. HR manager Rupa Roy must now formulate functional policies and activities that support this competitive strategy and boost performance, by eliciting the required employee behaviors and competencies.
As a longtime HR professional, Rupa Roy was well aware of the importance of effective employee recruitment. If the Planet Store didn't get enough applicants, it could not be selective about who to hire. And, if it could not be selective about who to hire, it wasn't likely that the shops would enjoy the customer-oriented employee behaviors that the company's strategy relied on. She was therefore disappointed to discover that the Planet Store was paying virtually no attention to the job of recruiting prospective employees. Individual shop managers slapped together help wanted ads when they had positions to fill, and no one in the chain had any measurable idea of how many recruits these ads were producing or which recruiting approaches worked the best (or worked at all). Rupa knew that it was time to step back and get control of the Planet Store's recruitment function.
As they reviewed the details of the Planet Store's current recruitment practices, Rupa Roy and the firm's CFO became increasingly concerned. What they found, basically, was that the The recruitment function was totally unmanaged. The previous HR director had simply allowed the responsibility for recruiting to remain with each separate store, and the store managers, not being HR professionals, usually just took the path of least resistance when a job became available by placing help wanted ads in their local papers. There was no sense of direction from the Planet Store's headquarters regarding what sorts of applicants the company preferred, what media and alternative sources of recruits its managers should use, no online recruiting, and, of course, no measurement at all of the effectiveness of the recruitment process. The company totally ignored recruitment-source metrics that other firms used effectively, such as number of qualified applicants per position, percentage of jobs filled from within, the offer-to-acceptance ratio, acceptance by recruiting source, turnover by recruiting source, and selection test results by recruiting source. This despite the fact, as the CFO put it, "that high-performance company consistently scores much higher than low-performing firms on HR practices such as number of qualified applicants per position, and percentage of jobs filled from within."
It was safe to say that achieving the Planet Store's strategic aims depended largely on the quality of the people that it attracted to, and then selected for, employment at the firm. "What we want are employees who will put our customers first, who will use initiative to see that our customers are satisfied, and who will work tirelessly to provide our customers with services that exceed their expectations," said the CFO.
Rupa and the CFO both knew this process had to start with better recruiting. The CFO gave her the green light to design a new recruitment process. Rupa and her team had the firm's IT department cre-ate a central recruiting link for the Planet Store's Website, with geographical links that each local store could use to publicize its openings. The HR team created a series of standard ads the managers could use for each job title. These standard ads emphasized the company's service-oriented values, and basically said (without actually saying it) that if you were not people oriented you should not apply. They emphasized what it was like to work for the Planet Store, and the excellent benefits (which the HR team was about to get started on) the firm provided. It cre-ated a new intranet based job posting system and encouraged employees to use it to apply for open positions. For several jobs, including sales personnel and cashier, applicants must now first pass a short pre screening test to apply. The HR team analyzed the performance (for instance, in terms of applicants/source and applicants hired/source) of the various local newspapers and recruiting firms the stores had used in the past, and chose the best to be the approved recruiting sources in their local areas.
After 6 months with these and other recruitment function changes, the number of applicants was up on average 40%. Rupa and her team were now set to institute new screening procedures that would help them select the high-commitment, service-oriented, motivated employees they were looking for.
Task
Answer the questions according to the case.
A. What new aspect Rupa has adopted to recruit new employees for the organization? How This new approach brings benefits for the organi-zations.
B. Based on given required personnel skills to attend customers, what recruiting sources would you have suggested it, and why?
C. How should have Rupa initiated the new recruiting process to get more effective result than the result mentioned in the case? Explain with showing the step by step process.