Reference no: EM133181153

Please read the case and the question

Case 1:

The Bluth Company's Accounting Department, which employs an ever-increasing number of accountants, bookkeepers, and administrative staff to manage large sums of money involved in developing sprawling suburbs, has approached you with an urgent problem. The Accounting Department has been over-burdened with work due to continued growth at the company and a detailed government audit that has taken many accountants away from their daily tasks for several months. Making the problem worse, the Accounting Department hasn't been able to recruit or hire enough new talent to manage the workload, and even when new employees are hired, the Department has experienced higher-than-normal turnover for new employees. Michael has provided you with the following background information about the Accounting Department: Things at the Accounting Department were running fairly smoothly until around six months ago. There were no serious HR-related issues, and the staff had no issues keeping up with the workload, although it had been noted that the workload had been steadily increasing for some time. Around six months ago, however, a discrepancy was noted in one of the accounts. Upon further investigation, it was determined that an employee was embezzling funds from the Company. The employee was immediately fired and all of the Company's accounts were audited. While no further discrepancies have been identified since then, the audit is ongoing, and is creating serious disruptions in the daily functions of the Accounting Department. In order to reduce the likelihood of a similar event in the future, the Board of Directors demanded that the Accounting Department institute a new, strict hiring process. The new hiring process was designed based on evidence-based best practices and implemented by the Board of Directors to try to proactively address future issues in the Accounting Department. Beginning around four months ago, accountants, bookkeepers, and support staff in the Department are now hired based exclusively on the results of four-hour cognitive ability test. The Board also requires all applicants to pass a series of integrity tests, a rigorous background check, and a polygraph (lie-detector) test. It was determined that hiring highly intelligent staff in the Accounting Department would help to address the heavy workload quickly. The Board determined that a multiple-choice cognitive ability test specifically designed around matching shapes and patterns, without any language or other communication requirements would be the most effective for identifying potential high-performers without discriminating against applicants with weaker English skills. As the Board of Directors put it in a memo, "working with numbers doesn't require great English or communication skills anyways." The integrity tests are extensive, and require a great deal of time and energy to complete over the course of several hours. The polygraph test is conducted by a former Toronto Police Detective who has over two decades of experience interrogating suspected criminals. The Board of Directors felt that this was appropriate, given the possibility of future theft and the potential scale of the damage that a dishonest employee could cause to the Company. Finally, the background check requires applicants to provide details about their past 10 years of work experience and multiple employment, professional, and personal references, in addition to a police background check. The Board of Directors now also forbids applicants from visiting the Accounting Department before they are hired. Hiring managers are also forbidden from describing the workplace and work environment, noting that it may negatively impact the validity of the assessments and potentially allow dishonest applicants to figure out a way to "cheat the system" which would reduce the effectiveness of the integrity tests. The work done in the Accounting Department is critical to the functioning of the Company - if bills aren't paid, money isn't handled correctly, and contractors are not paid on time, the entire Company will grind to a halt. Since the new selection process was put into place, the Accounting Department has steadily fallen behind on their work because there just are not enough employees to keep up. It is imperative that a solution be found as quickly as possible to help the Department to hire enough new talent, and retain their new employees, so that the Company can continue to operate properly. 

Question 1: Based on the above information and your expertise in personnel recruitment and selection, please identify the 7 problems with the selection process for the Accounting Department staff that the Board of Directors has implemented. Briefly describe how the Company could improve the selection process for Accounting Department staff while addressing the Board of Directors' concerns?

Case 2: Hiring an Office Administrator

With the rapidly increasing size of the Company, the workload facing every member of the organization has risen dramatically. It has become difficult to manage communications between departments, and things around the office are falling into disarray. Michael has decided to hire an additional Office Administrator in order to keep up with the increasing demands at the Company. Michael and one of his HR Managers, Kitty Sanchez, conducted interviews with several candidates (Alice, Bob, and Carol). They wanted to discuss the candidates with you:

Kitty: I really liked Alice. She was really well-dressed and looked professional. That's what we need for an Office Administrator here. Someone who knows how to dress smart and act the role. We don't want the builders here to walk all over them!

Michael: I agree. She definitely seemed like a professional. You two really hit it off! I don't know if her previous work experience was really enough for the job though. She was an administrative assistant for two years. Is that enough? Bob had much more experience.

Kitty: I suppose you're right, but Bob had one weak reference letter. Sure, his other references were glowing, but I don't know how anyone could have such a bad reference. That's a real red flag for me. Even during the interview, I could see what his reference was talking about. He wasn't very confident in his decisions, and that was really apparent when he was answering our questions. Right from the start when he shook my hand, it seemed weak and timid. 

Michael: But do you remember what Alice said when we asked her what kind of condiment he would be if he could be any condiment? Ketchup! Out of all of the condiments, she picked ketchup! There's no way we can have a "ketchup" person working here. 

Kitty: Hey, I like ketchup! What's not to like about ketchup? It goes on everything. That's what we're looking for here too - someone who can do little bit of everything, right? 

Michael: Fair enough. I just don't like ketchup though. Why ruin a good burger with ketchup? Anyways, we're getting off topic here. 

Kitty: Sorry, who's next? 

Michael: Carol. Both Alice and Bob were definitely better than Carol. She looked good on paper, but five minutes into that last interview I knew she wasn't the one we were looking for. What did she say when she was leaving? 'Smell ya later'? Who says that in a job interview? It really put a bad taste in my mouth and makes me wonder why we even interviewed her in the first place.

Kitty: I completely agree. It's frustrating that she was the most qualified though. She had actually held an Office Administrator position before and her resume was probably better than mine!

Michael: Ha! No kidding! But we definitely can't have someone like that working here. It's hard enough for us to be taken seriously by the brokers when we act professionally. What was her response to our question asking about her experience working with virtual teams again?

Kitty: If I remember correctly, it was actually a really good response, although she phrased it strangely. She talked about some conflict management training she had implemented which improved her teams' performance by something like 35%. We should really look into that for our teams!

Michael: Good thinking! Anyways, enough about her, I really think we should go over the pros and cons of Alice and Bob so that we can make a decision. They are the only ones we are really considering, right? 

Kitty: Right. I knew Carol was no good within two minutes of meeting her. Alice was confident and assertive. She had some really great answers to the questions we asked her, especially considering her limited experience.

Michael: Yes, and Bob had a lot of really relevant experience. I think he would be much better suited to the position. He will be able to handle a lot more of the problems that will arise thanks to the crazy growth we are seeing here. The whole point of this position is to improve the Corporation's productivity. Bob is going to be a lot more independent right away. 

Kitty: He was so anxious during the entire interview though! How can I trust him to be able to make the right call if he's not confident, even with all of that experience? 

Michael: I guess that's fair. But it was a job interview after all. I was probably just as nervous as Bob when I interviewed for this job! 

Kitty: I suppose so. This really isn't getting us anywhere though. How did you score them in their interviews? I have Bob scored as an A, and Alice scored as "really good" so I think Bob is in the lead, but I'm really not sure if that's the right call. I've got a bad feeling about hiring him. I wish I could remember what he said when we asked him about working from home. I remember it throwing me off in the interview. 

Michael: I've actually got them tied. Looking back, I've scored them both really low. I guess I'm just hard to please. That's probably what makes me a good manager - I'm a real perfectionist! 

Kitty: You're probably right, but that doesn't solve our problem. I was hoping to be able to make a decision today. How about we just sleep on it and try to sort this out with the rest of our staff during the department meeting in two weeks?

Question 2: Based on this conversation and your expertise with personnel recruitment and selection processes, what errors/mistakes have Michael and Kitty made? Be sure to indicate where in the conversation they made the errors/mistakes. 

Case 3: Discrimination?

Recently, the Bluth Company has been accused of discriminatory hiring practices for their administrative staff. Michael does not have any evidence or reports that there is a systemic issue of direct discrimination, but upon reviewing recent hiring results, there is evidence of adverse effect discrimination. In particular, the recent selection ratio data indicates that White women are hired at a disproportionately higher rate than any other demographic group. Based on this preliminary evidence of discrimination, Michael launched an investigation to determine how best to address the issue. The results of the investigation are summarized below: Administrative staff are critical to the functioning of the Company; they are able to reduce a great deal of the workload placed on the executives at the Company. Without qualified and high-performing administrative staff, the effectiveness of the Company, and the Company's profits, would suffer dramatically. Insufficient administrative staff support could lead to significant burnout, in addition to poor performance, and could ultimately jeopardize the entire Company. Because these are such critical jobs, the Board of Directors has budgeted $30,000 to recruit applicants for the 10 administrative staff positions that needed to be filled last year. Michael was pleased to learn that Kitty and her HR team only spent around $10,000 on recruitment for administrative staff positions, and all of the positions were filled. The rising prestige of the Bluth Company has made it very easy to generate a large applicant pool, and the Company was able to rely heavily on employee referrals to find applicants. Kitty has been happy to focus on employee referrals because they are very cost-efficient and because applicants who are referred to the Company often have a good idea of the type of work they will be required to do, and typically perform well on the job when they are hired. Other than referrals, the jobs were primarily advertised on Facebook, which represented almost all of the expenses incurred in recruiting administrative staff. Because there are so many different administrative staff jobs, and because the HR team doesn't know exactly what goes into each job, it was determined that Facebook advertising would be a very cost-effective approach to recruiting a large applicant pool. The HR team can save a lot of time by uploading a brief job ad with very few details, and allow the Facebook marketing algorithm to target potential applicants automatically. This approach generates a very large applicant pool for relatively little cost.

Question 3: Based on the results of the investigation and your expertise in personnel recruitment and selection, please identify the problems with the Bluth Company's recruitment process for administrative staff. What advice would you give to Michael and Kitty to improve the recruitment process for support staff and reduce the impacts of bias?