Deck 5: Planning for and Recruiting Human Resources

Question 1

Can Chipotle Source Employees as Ethically as It Sources Food?
With a strategy to sell "food with integrity," Chipotle Mexican Grill has pleased the taste of Americans and turned into a fast-food success story. In contrast to the typical fast-food chain, where recipes and menus are driven by marketing goals, Chipotle starts with the goal of selling delicious, fresh, sustainably grown foods. As hungry customers snap up its burritos and tacos, Chipotle is scheduling the addition of more than a hundred new outlets per year. Keeping up with growth is a major challenge for human resource management in the restaurant business. At fast-food restaurants, triple-digit turnover is normal, so restaurant managers are constantly in hiring mode. Thus, while Chipotle has 30,000 employees, it forecasts a need to hire 100,000 workers over three years.
The pace of growth has also challenged the company to hire enough managers. Under the leadership of co-CEO Monty Moran, the company has emphasized promoting managers from within. The goal is to retain the best performers by giving them raises and promotions. Chipotle's talent management efforts include career paths along which crew members become general managers with the potential to earn $100,000 or more. In fact, most of Chipotle's store managers started out making and serving the food.
Along the way, however, Chipotle has hit some bumps in recruitment. About half of Chipotle's employees are Hispanic, which the company sees as a plus because Chipotle sees this ethnic group as an important source of customers as well as employees. However, in hiring these workers, it needs to distinguish between those who are permitted to work in the United States (because they are citizens or immigrants with the necessary government documents) and those who are immigrants without authorization to work. Federal agents for Immigration and Customs Enforcement inspected the company's records in Minnesota, Virginia, and Washington, D.C., and determined that Chipotle had hired more than 500 undocumented immigrants. As a result, the company had to lay off hundreds of employees. At the affected restaurants, managers scrambled to keep operating while hiring and training replacement workers as fast as they could. In addition, Chipotle has spent more than $1 million in legal fees and risks being fined.
Meanwhile, to avoid further legal embarrassments, the company signed on to the government's E-Verify screening program, which uses a database to spot illegal workers. One practical result of compliance has been that workers who lacked documents no longer apply to Chipotle. That helps the company stay on the right side of the law but also has reduced the company's pool of applicants. Those who still apply do not always have the necessary skills and experience. In some markets, managers report interviewing up to 40 candidates to fill each job opening. And at a job fair in the state of Washington, Chipotle recruiters interviewed 100 people but found only eight of them to be qualified. Employee turnover has suffered as well, rising from 125% annually, in contrast to 100% turnover before the immigration enforcement. Moran suspects that many of the employees who quit were worried their documents would not stand up to government scrutiny, so they left to avoid trouble. Many immigrant workers in restaurants are in the United States on temporary visas that expire after a year, so even if hiring them is legal, they may not be able to stay legally employed for long.
In Moran's view, Chipotle's struggle to fill jobs is a by-product of overly harsh immigration laws. Moran has been urging the federal government to improve the process for legal immigration and hiring of immigrants. He wants good workers to be allowed to stay in the United States for the long term, so the company can let them build careers, as its strategy requires, rather than return to their country of origin after a year or two. Replacing and training workers with temporary visas every year is expensive and disrupts the development of teamwork in a work crew. So far, however, Moran's message has failed to sway politicians, so Chipotle must continue to staff its restaurants with workers who can prove they have the necessary documents under current law.
What factors can you identify that affect the supply of and demand for labor at Chipotle?

Answer 1

The firm C has grown exponentially over the period, as a result, it is facing problem in hiring qualified workers. Several bottlenecks on both the demand and supply side hinder the company to keep in track with the requirements. On the demand side, they want Hispanic in their company because, according to them, they are the source for both efficient employees as well as potential customers. However due to absence of government permits, they are unable to hire, and thus have to compromise with the strategy. Further, they also face the constraint of employing people with limited visa or with temporary stay for one or two years, because it breaks the team efficiency and raises menu cost.
On the supply side, when there was no scrutiny of legality of workers, they were employing about half of the workforce, who were not holding government permit. As government imposes penalty for employing unregistered worker, the company fear, if caught, they would have to pay penalty in millions of dollar, so they started hiring from government data base. As a result, the number of potential applicants also got reduced.
On one instance due to law, they would only able to hire only 8 out of 100.

Question 2

How can organizations improve the effectiveness of their recruiters?

Answer 2

Recruitment is the process of searching and hiring for best-qualified candidates, from within the organization or from external sources, for a vacant position at the organization. The recruitment process includes analyzing job requirements, gathering pool of candidates, screening and shortlisting candidates, hiring and orienting new employees to the organization.
Following are the ways in which organisation can improve the effectiveness of their recruiters:
• Recruiters must be trained on time management and effective project planning to reach the goals specified.
• The organisation should provide data support to the recruiters so that they can track employee tasks and activities in real time to help them create more productive work environment.
• Recruiters should be assessed constantly and should be trained to overcome the shortcomings in their skills.
• The recruiter should be made technology savvy so that they can use new and innovative methods for recruitment for introducing efficiency in the process.

Question 3

Trimming More Than the Fat
Getting lean improves an organization's efficiency and makes it stronger for the long haul. But some organizations are so desperate to cut costs that they don't just get lean, they starve themselves of important human resources.
That happened at a technology company in Texas. The company kept laying off employees in its design department until one interactive designer who remained was handling what she saw as the work of three designers. She also managed many of the company's web projects.
The employee was afraid to quit during a slow economy, but she was burning out from the strain of falling behind in spite of constant overtime and taking work home. Eventually she could no longer keep quiet, so she gave her supervisor the choice between promoting her to art director or dividing up the work among more people. The supervisor gave her the promotion (with a small raise) and began authorizing the employee to contract for help from a freelancer.
Companies that downsized during the recent recession may find themselves making more such bargains. Employees who feel exhausted and unappreciated are beginning to indicate that they want to leave their employers to find better jobs. The ones with the best chance to get a better offer are likely to be an organization's most valuable people.
Besides layoffs, how else might the design department respond to a decline in demand?

Answer 3

Layoff is not the only way to respond the shortage in demand. The company may also use alternative ways like deduction in salaries, stopping the perquisites, increasing the working hours. Few employees will not be able to handle the pressure and thus they would like to quit the job. If they do so, it does not becomes the responsibility of the company to take care of. Apart from these measures, company may also take help of mentoring the employees at the time of the shortage of salaries and over load of the work.

Question 4

Can Yahoo Still Attract Tech Workers?
In many fields, workers are practically begging employers to hire them, but in information technology, the demand for talent often outstrips the supply. Employers struggle to attract and keep software experts, always concerned about the risk that their best people will leave for a better offer somewhere else. For a high-tech worker, what often amounts to a better offer is a chance to be a part of the exciting new thing, whatever that is.
That presents a challenge for Yahoo. A couple of decades ago, the web search company (now an advertising, news, and e-mail company) was one of the hot businesses of the Internet age. Today Yahoo's sites attract 700 million visitors a month, and the company's 14,000 employees are well paid, but the excitement is no longer there. To the industry, Yahoo is part of the old Internet. The best and brightest want to be part of the new Internet, especially social media, cloud computing, and mobile apps.
In that environment, Yahoo is seeking pathways for growth even as some of its best talent is slipping out the doors. Greg Cohn, who worked his way up from business strategist to senior director responsible for new initiatives, admires Yahoo's management but left to start his own business. A vice president of Yahoo's operations in Latin America also left, and so has the company's chief trust officer, who moved to a position at Google. In another sign of employee dissatisfaction, a recruiter told a reporter, "If you call nine people at Yahoo, you'll get nine calls back." In other words, leaving sounds like an option for just about everyone. Executives are preparing for a faster exodus as job growth heats up elsewhere in Silicon Valley.
Because of these trends, Yahoo forecasts that it will need to do intensive recruiting. But how do you get people to think about working for a company that many believe has passed its prime? Yahoo definitely has work to do. Software engineers who look up employee reviews on Glassdoor.com would notice that employees rate Yahoo just 3.2 on a scale of 1 to 5, trailing Facebook (4.2), Google (3.9), and Apple (3.6). Seeing that, an engineer probably wouldn't bother to look up a Yahoo careers page.
One person who contributes to a solution is Susan Burnett, Yahoo's senior vice president of talent and organization development. Burnett aims to create an environment in which employees learn the skills they need to take on greater responsibilities. Burnett first established a development program for 2,000 high-potential employees. The program, called Leading Yahoos, teaches leadership, goal setting, and measurement of results. By helping these new leaders align their work with the company's overall strategy, it supports Yahoo's effort to make goals more visible to employees at all levels.
More directly, Yahoo is seeking to find highly skilled software experts by recruiting away from Silicon Valley, where the competition for talent is intense. For example, it worked with the Champaign County Economic Development Corporation to announce that it wanted to hire software developers to work at the University of Illinois Research Park. Yahoo said it had six to nine open positions but would consider hiring more if it received enough good applications. The company's publicity noted that it paid above-average salaries for the research park and that the Champaign facility was innovative, having applied for patents on 25 ideas.
Observers note that Yahoo still earns most of its money by employing reporters to write stories and salespeople to sell ads, an old-media kind of operation that is hard to run at a profit. Yahoo outsourced web search to Microsoft's Bing, and in spite of its leadership role in advertising, it has yet to offer much in the hot young market of mobile ads. Shifting from unprofitable, low-growth activities to activities with more potential could lead to significant staff cuts in some areas even as a hiring push continues in others. Still, one former employee sees hope. Geoff Ralston, who worked on Yahoo Mail, notes that EBay and Apple both survived periods when they seemed to be fading away. Ralston believes the solution is to buy or build "consumer experiences that are unbelievably great." That's a mission a tech worker would choose to accept.
What actions might Yahoo take to strengthen its internal recruiting? How might these efforts support Yahoo's corporate strategy?

Question 5

Review the sample transitional matrix shown in Table 5.1. What jobs experience the greatest turnover (employees leaving the organization)? How might an organization with this combination of jobs reduce the turnover?

Question 6

IS SOCIALSCORE MIXING BUSINESS AND PLEASURE?
Until recently, Facebook was mainly a place to keep up with the personal lives of family and friends. But after LinkedIn began to build a network of people focused on career development, Facebook wanted in on the career networking, too. It found a way in with a website called BranchOut, which offers a job board and job-hunting database. BranchOut users link to their Facebook account, and BranchOut pulls their information on education and work history from Facebook to create a BranchOut career profile. BranchOut also collects the user's connections to his or her Facebook friends.
To get people more engaged with the site, BranchOut came up with a quiz game called SocialScore. The game displays pairs of randomly selected Face-book friends and asks the player to choose which of those friends he or she would rather work with. BranchOut keeps score, notifies the winners, and saves the data. It can then combine the scores with, say, job title to create rankings. For example, at least in theory, a recruiter could buy rankings of accountants or waitresses based on their ratings by their friends.
Some people see the SocialScore game as a kind of middle-school-style popularity contest, not at all professional. Others can envision that the results would be a useful way to identify prospective hires who get along well with others.
If you were to play SocialScore with random pairs of people in your own Facebook network (or in other social networks you belong to), how well do you think your scores would represent these people's actual performance of a job? Would the scores be more fair or less fair to them than what you would say if a recruiter directly asked you to evaluate them as a possible employee? Is it ethical to ask people to play a game and then use the scores for hiring decisions? Why or why not?

Question 7

Can Chipotle Source Employees as Ethically as It Sources Food?
With a strategy to sell "food with integrity," Chipotle Mexican Grill has pleased the taste of Americans and turned into a fast-food success story. In contrast to the typical fast-food chain, where recipes and menus are driven by marketing goals, Chipotle starts with the goal of selling delicious, fresh, sustainably grown foods. As hungry customers snap up its burritos and tacos, Chipotle is scheduling the addition of more than a hundred new outlets per year. Keeping up with growth is a major challenge for human resource management in the restaurant business. At fast-food restaurants, triple-digit turnover is normal, so restaurant managers are constantly in hiring mode. Thus, while Chipotle has 30,000 employees, it forecasts a need to hire 100,000 workers over three years.
The pace of growth has also challenged the company to hire enough managers. Under the leadership of co-CEO Monty Moran, the company has emphasized promoting managers from within. The goal is to retain the best performers by giving them raises and promotions. Chipotle's talent management efforts include career paths along which crew members become general managers with the potential to earn $100,000 or more. In fact, most of Chipotle's store managers started out making and serving the food.
Along the way, however, Chipotle has hit some bumps in recruitment. About half of Chipotle's employees are Hispanic, which the company sees as a plus because Chipotle sees this ethnic group as an important source of customers as well as employees. However, in hiring these workers, it needs to distinguish between those who are permitted to work in the United States (because they are citizens or immigrants with the necessary government documents) and those who are immigrants without authorization to work. Federal agents for Immigration and Customs Enforcement inspected the company's records in Minnesota, Virginia, and Washington, D.C., and determined that Chipotle had hired more than 500 undocumented immigrants. As a result, the company had to lay off hundreds of employees. At the affected restaurants, managers scrambled to keep operating while hiring and training replacement workers as fast as they could. In addition, Chipotle has spent more than $1 million in legal fees and risks being fined.
Meanwhile, to avoid further legal embarrassments, the company signed on to the government's E-Verify screening program, which uses a database to spot illegal workers. One practical result of compliance has been that workers who lacked documents no longer apply to Chipotle. That helps the company stay on the right side of the law but also has reduced the company's pool of applicants. Those who still apply do not always have the necessary skills and experience. In some markets, managers report interviewing up to 40 candidates to fill each job opening. And at a job fair in the state of Washington, Chipotle recruiters interviewed 100 people but found only eight of them to be qualified. Employee turnover has suffered as well, rising from 125% annually, in contrast to 100% turnover before the immigration enforcement. Moran suspects that many of the employees who quit were worried their documents would not stand up to government scrutiny, so they left to avoid trouble. Many immigrant workers in restaurants are in the United States on temporary visas that expire after a year, so even if hiring them is legal, they may not be able to stay legally employed for long.
In Moran's view, Chipotle's struggle to fill jobs is a by-product of overly harsh immigration laws. Moran has been urging the federal government to improve the process for legal immigration and hiring of immigrants. He wants good workers to be allowed to stay in the United States for the long term, so the company can let them build careers, as its strategy requires, rather than return to their country of origin after a year or two. Replacing and training workers with temporary visas every year is expensive and disrupts the development of teamwork in a work crew. So far, however, Moran's message has failed to sway politicians, so Chipotle must continue to staff its restaurants with workers who can prove they have the necessary documents under current law.
Immigrant workers have been an important part of the labor pool for Chipotle (and many other restaurants). If you worked in Chipotle's HR department, would you recommend that it continue to recruit immigrant workers or target another group of workers for hiring? Why? Which other groups, if any, would you target?

Question 8

Can Yahoo Still Attract Tech Workers?
In many fields, workers are practically begging employers to hire them, but in information technology, the demand for talent often outstrips the supply. Employers struggle to attract and keep software experts, always concerned about the risk that their best people will leave for a better offer somewhere else. For a high-tech worker, what often amounts to a better offer is a chance to be a part of the exciting new thing, whatever that is.
That presents a challenge for Yahoo. A couple of decades ago, the web search company (now an advertising, news, and e-mail company) was one of the hot businesses of the Internet age. Today Yahoo's sites attract 700 million visitors a month, and the company's 14,000 employees are well paid, but the excitement is no longer there. To the industry, Yahoo is part of the old Internet. The best and brightest want to be part of the new Internet, especially social media, cloud computing, and mobile apps.
In that environment, Yahoo is seeking pathways for growth even as some of its best talent is slipping out the doors. Greg Cohn, who worked his way up from business strategist to senior director responsible for new initiatives, admires Yahoo's management but left to start his own business. A vice president of Yahoo's operations in Latin America also left, and so has the company's chief trust officer, who moved to a position at Google. In another sign of employee dissatisfaction, a recruiter told a reporter, "If you call nine people at Yahoo, you'll get nine calls back." In other words, leaving sounds like an option for just about everyone. Executives are preparing for a faster exodus as job growth heats up elsewhere in Silicon Valley.
Because of these trends, Yahoo forecasts that it will need to do intensive recruiting. But how do you get people to think about working for a company that many believe has passed its prime? Yahoo definitely has work to do. Software engineers who look up employee reviews on Glassdoor.com would notice that employees rate Yahoo just 3.2 on a scale of 1 to 5, trailing Facebook (4.2), Google (3.9), and Apple (3.6). Seeing that, an engineer probably wouldn't bother to look up a Yahoo careers page.
One person who contributes to a solution is Susan Burnett, Yahoo's senior vice president of talent and organization development. Burnett aims to create an environment in which employees learn the skills they need to take on greater responsibilities. Burnett first established a development program for 2,000 high-potential employees. The program, called Leading Yahoos, teaches leadership, goal setting, and measurement of results. By helping these new leaders align their work with the company's overall strategy, it supports Yahoo's effort to make goals more visible to employees at all levels.
More directly, Yahoo is seeking to find highly skilled software experts by recruiting away from Silicon Valley, where the competition for talent is intense. For example, it worked with the Champaign County Economic Development Corporation to announce that it wanted to hire software developers to work at the University of Illinois Research Park. Yahoo said it had six to nine open positions but would consider hiring more if it received enough good applications. The company's publicity noted that it paid above-average salaries for the research park and that the Champaign facility was innovative, having applied for patents on 25 ideas.
Observers note that Yahoo still earns most of its money by employing reporters to write stories and salespeople to sell ads, an old-media kind of operation that is hard to run at a profit. Yahoo outsourced web search to Microsoft's Bing, and in spite of its leadership role in advertising, it has yet to offer much in the hot young market of mobile ads. Shifting from unprofitable, low-growth activities to activities with more potential could lead to significant staff cuts in some areas even as a hiring push continues in others. Still, one former employee sees hope. Geoff Ralston, who worked on Yahoo Mail, notes that EBay and Apple both survived periods when they seemed to be fading away. Ralston believes the solution is to buy or build "consumer experiences that are unbelievably great." That's a mission a tech worker would choose to accept.
If you were responsible for college recruiting at Yahoo, where would you recruit, and what would you say? Why?

Question 9

In the same transitional matrix, which jobs seem to rely the most on internal recruitment? Which seem to rely most on external recruitment? Why?

Question 10

Can Chipotle Source Employees as Ethically as It Sources Food?
With a strategy to sell "food with integrity," Chipotle Mexican Grill has pleased the taste of Americans and turned into a fast-food success story. In contrast to the typical fast-food chain, where recipes and menus are driven by marketing goals, Chipotle starts with the goal of selling delicious, fresh, sustainably grown foods. As hungry customers snap up its burritos and tacos, Chipotle is scheduling the addition of more than a hundred new outlets per year. Keeping up with growth is a major challenge for human resource management in the restaurant business. At fast-food restaurants, triple-digit turnover is normal, so restaurant managers are constantly in hiring mode. Thus, while Chipotle has 30,000 employees, it forecasts a need to hire 100,000 workers over three years.
The pace of growth has also challenged the company to hire enough managers. Under the leadership of co-CEO Monty Moran, the company has emphasized promoting managers from within. The goal is to retain the best performers by giving them raises and promotions. Chipotle's talent management efforts include career paths along which crew members become general managers with the potential to earn $100,000 or more. In fact, most of Chipotle's store managers started out making and serving the food.
Along the way, however, Chipotle has hit some bumps in recruitment. About half of Chipotle's employees are Hispanic, which the company sees as a plus because Chipotle sees this ethnic group as an important source of customers as well as employees. However, in hiring these workers, it needs to distinguish between those who are permitted to work in the United States (because they are citizens or immigrants with the necessary government documents) and those who are immigrants without authorization to work. Federal agents for Immigration and Customs Enforcement inspected the company's records in Minnesota, Virginia, and Washington, D.C., and determined that Chipotle had hired more than 500 undocumented immigrants. As a result, the company had to lay off hundreds of employees. At the affected restaurants, managers scrambled to keep operating while hiring and training replacement workers as fast as they could. In addition, Chipotle has spent more than $1 million in legal fees and risks being fined.
Meanwhile, to avoid further legal embarrassments, the company signed on to the government's E-Verify screening program, which uses a database to spot illegal workers. One practical result of compliance has been that workers who lacked documents no longer apply to Chipotle. That helps the company stay on the right side of the law but also has reduced the company's pool of applicants. Those who still apply do not always have the necessary skills and experience. In some markets, managers report interviewing up to 40 candidates to fill each job opening. And at a job fair in the state of Washington, Chipotle recruiters interviewed 100 people but found only eight of them to be qualified. Employee turnover has suffered as well, rising from 125% annually, in contrast to 100% turnover before the immigration enforcement. Moran suspects that many of the employees who quit were worried their documents would not stand up to government scrutiny, so they left to avoid trouble. Many immigrant workers in restaurants are in the United States on temporary visas that expire after a year, so even if hiring them is legal, they may not be able to stay legally employed for long.
In Moran's view, Chipotle's struggle to fill jobs is a by-product of overly harsh immigration laws. Moran has been urging the federal government to improve the process for legal immigration and hiring of immigrants. He wants good workers to be allowed to stay in the United States for the long term, so the company can let them build careers, as its strategy requires, rather than return to their country of origin after a year or two. Replacing and training workers with temporary visas every year is expensive and disrupts the development of teamwork in a work crew. So far, however, Moran's message has failed to sway politicians, so Chipotle must continue to staff its restaurants with workers who can prove they have the necessary documents under current law.
Suggest two or three recruiting methods Chipotle could use to locate qualified, legal workers who would be likely to stay with Chipotle for the long term. What are the advantages and drawbacks of the methods you chose?

Question 11

Why do organizations combine statistical and judgmental forecasts of labor demand, rather than relying on statistics or judgment alone? Give an example of a situation in which each type of forecast would be inaccurate.

Question 12

Some organizations have derailed affirmative-action plans, complete with goals and timetables, for women and minorities, yet have no formal human resource plan for the organization as a whole. Why might this be the case? What does this practice suggest about the role of human resource management in these organizations?

Question 13

Four in Ten Positions Are Filled with Insiders
In a survey of large, well-known businesses, respondents said over 40% of positions are filled with people who already work for the company and accept a promotion or transfer.
During the recent recession, hiring from within accounted for about half of all positions filled. As companies have begun to grow again, the greater demand for talent is requiring more external recruiting.
Could a growing company fill more than half its open positions with internal recruiting? Why or why not?

Note: "Internal movement" refers to jobs filled from employees currently in the company who are referred by managers or receive promotions or transfers; "all external sources" refers to employees found using sources outside the company such as electronic recruiting from company or job websites, employment agencies, colleges and universities, walk-in applicants, print ads, and referrals.

Question 14

Give an example of a personnel policy that would help attract a larger pool of job candidates. Give an example of a personnel policy that would likely reduce the pool of candidates. Would you expect these policies to influence the quality as well as the number of applicants? Why or why not?

Question 15

Trimming More Than the Fat
Getting lean improves an organization's efficiency and makes it stronger for the long haul. But some organizations are so desperate to cut costs that they don't just get lean, they starve themselves of important human resources.
That happened at a technology company in Texas. The company kept laying off employees in its design department until one interactive designer who remained was handling what she saw as the work of three designers. She also managed many of the company's web projects.
The employee was afraid to quit during a slow economy, but she was burning out from the strain of falling behind in spite of constant overtime and taking work home. Eventually she could no longer keep quiet, so she gave her supervisor the choice between promoting her to art director or dividing up the work among more people. The supervisor gave her the promotion (with a small raise) and began authorizing the employee to contract for help from a freelancer.
Companies that downsized during the recent recession may find themselves making more such bargains. Employees who feel exhausted and unappreciated are beginning to indicate that they want to leave their employers to find better jobs. The ones with the best chance to get a better offer are likely to be an organization's most valuable people.
In what ways do you think the downsizing in the technology company's design department was ineffective at improving the company's performance?

Question 16

Discuss the relative merits of internal versus external recruitment. Give an example of a situation in which each of these approaches might be particularly effective.

Question 17

Can Yahoo Still Attract Tech Workers?
In many fields, workers are practically begging employers to hire them, but in information technology, the demand for talent often outstrips the supply. Employers struggle to attract and keep software experts, always concerned about the risk that their best people will leave for a better offer somewhere else. For a high-tech worker, what often amounts to a better offer is a chance to be a part of the exciting new thing, whatever that is.
That presents a challenge for Yahoo. A couple of decades ago, the web search company (now an advertising, news, and e-mail company) was one of the hot businesses of the Internet age. Today Yahoo's sites attract 700 million visitors a month, and the company's 14,000 employees are well paid, but the excitement is no longer there. To the industry, Yahoo is part of the old Internet. The best and brightest want to be part of the new Internet, especially social media, cloud computing, and mobile apps.
In that environment, Yahoo is seeking pathways for growth even as some of its best talent is slipping out the doors. Greg Cohn, who worked his way up from business strategist to senior director responsible for new initiatives, admires Yahoo's management but left to start his own business. A vice president of Yahoo's operations in Latin America also left, and so has the company's chief trust officer, who moved to a position at Google. In another sign of employee dissatisfaction, a recruiter told a reporter, "If you call nine people at Yahoo, you'll get nine calls back." In other words, leaving sounds like an option for just about everyone. Executives are preparing for a faster exodus as job growth heats up elsewhere in Silicon Valley.
Because of these trends, Yahoo forecasts that it will need to do intensive recruiting. But how do you get people to think about working for a company that many believe has passed its prime? Yahoo definitely has work to do. Software engineers who look up employee reviews on Glassdoor.com would notice that employees rate Yahoo just 3.2 on a scale of 1 to 5, trailing Facebook (4.2), Google (3.9), and Apple (3.6). Seeing that, an engineer probably wouldn't bother to look up a Yahoo careers page.
One person who contributes to a solution is Susan Burnett, Yahoo's senior vice president of talent and organization development. Burnett aims to create an environment in which employees learn the skills they need to take on greater responsibilities. Burnett first established a development program for 2,000 high-potential employees. The program, called Leading Yahoos, teaches leadership, goal setting, and measurement of results. By helping these new leaders align their work with the company's overall strategy, it supports Yahoo's effort to make goals more visible to employees at all levels.
More directly, Yahoo is seeking to find highly skilled software experts by recruiting away from Silicon Valley, where the competition for talent is intense. For example, it worked with the Champaign County Economic Development Corporation to announce that it wanted to hire software developers to work at the University of Illinois Research Park. Yahoo said it had six to nine open positions but would consider hiring more if it received enough good applications. The company's publicity noted that it paid above-average salaries for the research park and that the Champaign facility was innovative, having applied for patents on 25 ideas.
Observers note that Yahoo still earns most of its money by employing reporters to write stories and salespeople to sell ads, an old-media kind of operation that is hard to run at a profit. Yahoo outsourced web search to Microsoft's Bing, and in spite of its leadership role in advertising, it has yet to offer much in the hot young market of mobile ads. Shifting from unprofitable, low-growth activities to activities with more potential could lead to significant staff cuts in some areas even as a hiring push continues in others. Still, one former employee sees hope. Geoff Ralston, who worked on Yahoo Mail, notes that EBay and Apple both survived periods when they seemed to be fading away. Ralston believes the solution is to buy or build "consumer experiences that are unbelievably great." That's a mission a tech worker would choose to accept.
What conclusions can you draw about the supply of and demand for labor at Yahoo?

Question 18

List the jobs you have held. How were you recruited for each of these? From the organization's perspective, what were some pros and cons of recruiting you through these methods?

Question 19

Suppose an organization expects a labor shortage to develop in key job areas over the next few years. Recommend general responses the organization could make in each of the following areas:
a. Recruitment
b. Training
c. Compensation (pay and employee benefits)

Question 20

Recruiting people for jobs that require international assignments is increasingly important for many organizations. Where might an organization go to recruit people interested in such assignments?

Question 21

IS SOCIALSCORE MIXING BUSINESS AND PLEASURE?
Until recently, Facebook was mainly a place to keep up with the personal lives of family and friends. But after LinkedIn began to build a network of people focused on career development, Facebook wanted in on the career networking, too. It found a way in with a website called BranchOut, which offers a job board and job-hunting database. BranchOut users link to their Facebook account, and BranchOut pulls their information on education and work history from Facebook to create a BranchOut career profile. BranchOut also collects the user's connections to his or her Facebook friends.
To get people more engaged with the site, BranchOut came up with a quiz game called SocialScore. The game displays pairs of randomly selected Face-book friends and asks the player to choose which of those friends he or she would rather work with. BranchOut keeps score, notifies the winners, and saves the data. It can then combine the scores with, say, job title to create rankings. For example, at least in theory, a recruiter could buy rankings of accountants or waitresses based on their ratings by their friends.
Some people see the SocialScore game as a kind of middle-school-style popularity contest, not at all professional. Others can envision that the results would be a useful way to identify prospective hires who get along well with others.
If a BranchOut user plays SocialScore, who is affected by the scores? Does it seem ethical to you that a recruiter could evaluate a candidate based on a score over which the candidate has no control? Why or why not?

Question 22

A large share of HR professionals have rated e-cruiting as their best source of new talent. What qualities of electronic recruiting do you think contribute to this opinion?