Keller HRM 594 Strategic Staffing Final Exam (online)

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Review

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Staffing for Competitive Advantage

A competitive advantage is something that a company can do differently from its competitors allowing it to perform better, survive, and succeed in its industry.
Every company’s employees create, enhance, or implement the company’s competitive advantage.
Where do these employees come from?

It all begins with the staffing process.

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Staffing Goals

Outcome Goals—after hire

Hiring successful employees

Hiring individuals who will be eventually promoted

Reducing turnover rates among high performers

Hiring individuals for whom the other HR functions will have the desired impact

Meeting stakeholder needs

Maximizing the financial return on the firm’s staffing investment

Enhancing employee diversity

Enabling organization flexibility

Enhancing business strategy execution

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Integration With
Other Areas of HR

Training

Performance management

Compensation

Succession planning

Career development

Recruitment impacts selection activities and the likelihood of successfully identifying good hires

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Business Strategy

. 1) Cost leadership strategy: strive to be the lowest cost producer for a particular level of product quality (Wal-Mart, Dell, FedEx).

Competitive advantage based on operational excellence: maximizing the efficiency of the manufacturing or product development process to minimize costs.

Differentiation strategy: developing a product or service that has unique characteristics valued by customers (Johnson & Johnson, Nike, 3M).

Competitive advantage based on product innovation.

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Business Strategy

3) Specialization strategy: focus on a narrow market segment or niche and pursue either a differentiation or cost leadership strategy within that market segment (Starbucks, Red Lobster, Seiko).

Competitive advantage based on customer intimacy: deliver unique and customizable products or services to meet their customers’ needs and increase customer loyalty.

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Staffing Implications of Different Sources of Competitive Advantage

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Strategies

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Strategies, cont.

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Mixed Motive Case
of Disparate Treatment

Employer is accused of having both, a legitimate, and an illegitimate reason for making the employment decision.

It is sufficient to show that a protected characteristic (race, sex, etc.) was a motivating factor in an employment decision, even if other legitimate factors (such as absences) also motivated the decision.

A plaintiff only needs to prove that the protected characteristic was a motivating factor – one of the reasons for the decision – no matter how small a role it played.

If a plaintiff satisfies the burden of proof that discrimination was a motivating factor in the employer’s adverse employment action, the employer is found liable.

The burden of proof then shifts to the employer to eliminate or reduce a plaintiff’s monetary damages by proving to the jury that they would have made the same employment decision in the absence of the discriminatory motive.

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Disparate Treatment and
Mixed Motive Cases

Under the mixed motive analysis, the burden of proof is on the defendant to show that the decision would have been the same despite plaintiff’s race or sex.

Under the disparate treatment method, the burden of proof is on the plaintiff to disprove the same thing.

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Negligent Referral

Definition: misrepresenting or failing to disclose complete and accurate information about a former employee.

A former employer can be sued for negligent referral if the employee is involved in some incident at the new workplace that might have been predicted based on prior behavior.

Defamation (an unprivileged publication of false statements to third parties that tends to harm the reputation of the plaintiff in the community) is currently the most common cause of action used by former employees to challenge a former employer’s reference.

To avoid the risk of a defamation charge it may be best to say as little as possible except in those situations where the employee’s behaviors could endanger others in the new workplace.

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Job Analysis

Definition: a systematic process of identifying and describing the important aspects of a job and the characteristics workers need to perform the job well
Job analyses are used for multiple purposes, including:

Determining job entry requirements

Developing a company’s strategic recruiting plan

Selecting individuals for employment

Developing employee training plans

Designing compensation systems

Developing performance evaluation measures

Job analyses also help group jobs into job families or groupings of jobs that either call for similar worker characteristics or contain parallel work tasks

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Job Analysis for Staffing

A job analysis that produces a valid selection system identifies worker characteristics that:

Distinguish superior from average and unacceptable workers;

Are not easily learned on the job; and

Exist to at least a moderate extent in the applicant pool.

Future-oriented job analysis: job analysis technique for analyzing new jobs or analyzing how jobs will look in the future

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Outcomes of Job Analysis

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Competencies Related to Specific Job Environments

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Workforce Planning

The availability of the talent needed to execute a desired business strategy will be an influence whether or not that strategy is ultimately successful.

Workforce planning: the process of predicting an organization’s future employment needs and the availability of current employees and external hires to meet those employment needs and execute the organization’s business strategy.

Workforce planning is the foundation of strategic staffing because it identifies and addresses future challenges to a firm’s ability to get the right talent in place at the right time to execute its business strategy.

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Workforce Planning Process

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Forecasting

Given the uncertainty of forecasts, construct estimates as a range, providing low, probable, and high estimates.

Recalculate estimates as changes happen in the organization’s internal and external environments and as the firm’s assumptions and expectations change.

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Forecasting Business Activity

An organization’s product demand directly affects its need for labor
Locate reliable, high-quality information sources within and outside of the organization to forecast business activity
Types of business activity forecasts:

Seasonal

Interest rate

Currency exchange

Competitors

Industry and economic

Others

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Forecasting Labor Demand

It is a good idea to identify minimal as well as optimal staffing levels when analyzing labor demand.
An organization’s demand for labor depends on its forecasted business activity and its business needs, which depend on its business strategy.
Business needs can include things like:

Achieving the staffing levels necessary for generating a given amount of revenue within a particular period of time (e.g., salesperson staffing levels necessary to generate $5 million of revenue within 6 months)

Increasing staffing levels to execute a growth strategy

Decreasing staffing levels during a restructuring

Obtaining the new talents needed to create new products or provide different services

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Ratio Analysis

Assumes that there is a relatively fixed ratio between the number of employees needed and certain business metrics.

Using historical patterns within the firm helps to establish a reasonable range for these ratios.

This process can be used for either justifying new positions or demonstrating the need for layoffs.

Need consistent historical trends to calculate ratios.

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Possible Ratios

Production to employees

Revenue per employee

Managers to employees

Inventory levels to employees

Number of customers or customer orders to employees

Labor costs to all production costs

The percent utilization of production capacity to employees

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Factors Influencing
Recruiter Effectiveness

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Nine Box Matrix for assessing internal candidates

Nine box matrix: a combined assessment of an employee’s performance and potential.

Is a method for displaying judgments made about employees, not for making those judgments.

Its value depends on the quality of the assessment methodology that determines the box each individual is placed in.
It can help companies understand the overall strength of their workforce, but only if the employees were accurately evaluated in the first place.

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Final Choice – hiring candidates

Cut score: a minimum assessment score that must be met or exceeded to advance to the next assessment phase or to be eligible to receive a job offer.
Rank ordering: ranking candidates from highest to lowest scoring.
Banding: Everyone who scores within a certain range of scores is considered to have performed equivalently and assigned the same grade.

Hiring within the band is done randomly or based on other factors (EEO or affirmative action goals, etc.).

Banding allows for the consideration of other factors in making a final choice, including whether an internal candidate is at risk of leaving the company if passed up for a promotion.

Band widths are generally calculated on the basis of the standard error of measurement.

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Legal Issues

The Fair Labor Standards Act: covers working hours and the payment of overtime or compensatory time off to nonexempt employees.

If an applicant is not hired because the applicant has previously exercised his or her rights under the FLSA, a court may conclude that the applicant’s rights have been violated.

The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA): entitles qualified applicants up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave for certain reasons.

If an applicant is not hired because he or she had previously exercised his or her rights under the FMLA, a court may conclude that the applicant’s rights have been violated. For example, a federal appellate court held that an employer who failed to hire an applicant because she “took a lot of FMLA” violated this statute.

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Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures

The UGESP require the elimination of adverse impact or its justification through validation studies.
The Guidelines generally state that cut scores should be set no higher than necessary to achieve acceptable proficiency among those hired.

The determination of this minimum proficiency level is up to the firm.

Even if an assessment method or battery is highly valid, it is not advisable to set a cut score that generates adverse impact and that screens out minority applicants whose scores are consistent with normal expectations of acceptable proficiency.

The UGESP also state that “the way in which normal expectations of proficiency within the workforce were determined and the way in which the cutoff score was determined” should be described.

To deal with adverse impact problems, the UGESP also discuss the use of “alternative procedures” that cause less adverse impact but that have similar validity to the problematic procedure.

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Preference for Diversity
During Final Choice

Affirmative action and diversity programs need to be carefully implemented to avoid the potential for legal trouble.
Pursuing diverse hires should not begin during the assessment stage of the hiring process.

If qualified diverse candidates do not become part of the applicant pool, no selection system can identify them.

If sourcing and recruiting activities identify and attract qualified diverse applicants, then applying a valid assessment system that has little to no adverse impact should generate quality, diverse hires.

Successfully attracting qualified diverse applicants eliminates the need to consider any protected characteristic as a “plus factor” in the final candidate choice.

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