See the attached documents.? – Please cite your work in your responses – Please use APA (7th edition) formatting? – All quest

Assignment 1: Case Study 1 Part A: Recruiting and Selection

Worth up to 25 points and 25% of course grade

The purpose of the activity is for you to explain and evaluate different recruiting and selection

methods and systems.

Assignment alignment with Course Competencies:

• Understand the essential components of the HR functions of recruiting and selection.

• Recommend recruiting and selection solutions or initiatives to address dynamic customer and stakeholder needs.

• Interpret HR recruiting and selection issues and challenges to develop strategic solutions and interventions.

• Critique recruiting and selection initiatives to ensure alignment with HR and organizational strategies.

Deliverable:

1. Read the entire case study carefully and then respond to the four Discussion Questions on page 5. Answer all questions and all parts of each question.

2. Develop each answer to the fullest extent possible, including citations from course resources, where applicable, to support your arguments

3. Submit your assignment as a separate MS Word document in your assignments folder. Do not type your answers into the case study document.

4. Include a Cover Page with Name, Date, and Title of Assignment. 5. Do not include the original question. Use the following format: Question 1, Question 2,

etc.

6. Each response should be written in complete sentences, double-spaced and spell-checked. Use 12-point Times New Roman font with 1-inch margins on all sides

7. Include page numbers according to APA formatting guidelines. 8. Include citations in APA format at the end of each answer. 9. You must submit to the assignment link by the due date. A missing assignment will be

assigned a grade of 0.

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Assignment 1

Please read ALL directions below before starting your final

assignment.

INSTRUCTIONS:

1. Read the entire case study carefully and then respond to the four Discussion Questions on page 5. Answer all questions and all parts of each question.

2. Develop each answer to the fullest extent possible, including evidence from the case and citations from outside resources and course resources, where applicable, to support your arguments.

3. Submit your assignment as a separate MS Word document in your assignments folder. Do not type your answers into the case study document.

4. Include a Cover Page with Name, Date, and Title of Assignment.

5. Do not include the original question. Use the following format: Question 1, Question 2, etc.

6. Each response should be written in complete sentences, double- spaced and spell-checked. Use 12-point Times New Roman font with 1-inch margins on all sides.

7. Include page numbers according to APA formatting guidelines. 8. Include citations in APA format at the end of each answer. 9. You must submit to the assignment link by the due date. A missing

assignment will be assigned a grade of 0.

© 2008 Society for Human Resource Management. Alan Cabelly, Ph.D.

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Case Overview Part A

In August, Jason Hubbs submitted a résumé to the human resource department of Big Time

Computers Inc. in response to an advertisement in the local newspaper for a senior technical

writer. The résumé was forwarded to Big Time’s Manager of Technical Publications, Lisa

Cavanaugh, for her consideration.

Big Time Computers is a local high-tech firm with sales offices throughout the United States

and Europe. At the time of the senior technical writer job advertisement, Big Time employed

about 1,200 people. Big Time designs and manufactures high-end computer systems that sell in

the $500,000 to $6,000,000 range. Big Time’s products are sophisticated and complex, and the

working atmosphere is highly technical. The engineering department is the largest and most

dominant department. Engineers are in management positions throughout the company,

including top-level management. Due to the sophistication and complexity of their products,

employees in marketing, customer service, and technical publications are required to have

strong technical backgrounds; many have engineering or computer science degrees.

The technical publications department employed 14 people. This included the manager, two

senior writers (Mark Samson and Chris Murray), seven writers, one technical editor (Colton

Hamrick), and three editorial assistants. The manager had a business degree and had been

working in the technical publications field for 12 years. The senior writers had four-year

engineering degrees; the other seven writers had engineering degrees, computer science degrees,

or two-year associate’s degrees in a technical field. The technical editor had an English degree

and an associate’s degree in electronics, and the editorial assistants had English or liberal arts

degrees.

The department had a well-established set of procedures for new manuals and manual

revisions. When given a writing assignment, the writer would do the necessary research by

reading product specifications and interviewing the engineers involved with the product. The

writer would then develop an outline which was reviewed by the appropriate engineers and the

technical publications project leader responsible for that product. The writer then wrote a first

draft which was edited by the technical editor and reviewed company-wide. The reviewer list

included key people from each area of the company. After making necessary changes, the

writer submitted the manual for a brief second review and made additional changes. An

editorial assistant did proofreading and formatting before each review, and when the two

reviews were complete, the editorial assistant did the final proofing and formatting. The

manual was then printed. This extensive review procedure gave the writers a great deal of

exposure throughout the company.

© 2008 Society for Human Resource Management. Alan Cabelly, Ph.D.

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The current job opening was a new position at Big Time that was necessitated by an increased

workload. Although some internal people wanted to apply for the job, Cavanaugh believed that

no internal candidates had the necessary skills for the position; besides, she thought it would be

good to bring in new blood at the top. She found one strong résumé and began the hiring

process.

In considering Jason Hubbs’s résumé, Cavanaugh noted that Hubbs had a computer science

degree, was working toward a Doctoral degree, and had three years’ experience as a technical

writer in a local high-tech firm. Cavanaugh was impressed with Hubbs’s credentials and

scheduled an interview date. Cavanaugh included herself, the technical editor and the two senior

writers on Hubbs’s interview schedule. Cavanaugh’s interview was general, focusing on

background, goals and work habits. Hamrick, the technical editor, asked questions regarding

writing skills and techniques, while Samson and Murray, the senior writers, focused on Hubbs’s

technical skills.

Cavanaugh then met with the interviewers to determine if Hubbs was qualified for the senior

technical writer job. Cavanaugh was pleased with Hubbs’s responses to her general questions

and liked the writing samples he had given her. Hamrick felt that Hubbs had answered the

interview questions well, but had reservations about his interpersonal skills and ability to

integrate into the department. He also had some concerns about one of the writing samples.

Samson and Murray thought his technical skills were excellent and had no strong feelings either

way about his interpersonal skills. Cavanaugh, Samson, and Murray all felt that Hubbs should be

hired; Hamrick disagreed. Cavanaugh checked two of Hubbs’s three references and got good

reports on his skills and work habits. She hired him.

© 2008 Society for Human Resource Management. Alan Cabelly, Ph.D.

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Big Time Computers inc.

Technical Publications Department

© 2008 Society for Human Resource Management. Alan Cabelly, Ph.D.

Lisa Cavanaugh

Mark Samson

5

Answer the following:

1. Evaluate the recruiting strategy and methods used by the hiring manager and identify and

discuss any gaps or limitations. Explain and defend your answers.

• Do you agree or disagree with the recruiting strategy?

• Do you agree or disagree with the decision to not consider internal

candidates?

• Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of internal vs. external recruiting

methods as they apply to this case.

• Discuss 3 additional recruiting sources that could have been used to find

potential candidates and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each as

they apply to this case.

2. A) Evaluate the selection methods, including the interviewing process used by the hiring

manager. Do you believe they were effective? Discuss any limitations or challenges that

may exist with the selection methods and the interview process used.

B) Discuss 3 other selection methods that could have been used and discuss the

advantages and disadvantages of each as they apply to this case.

3. Evaluate the decision of the hiring manager to make the candidate an offer despite the

concerns of Hamrick. Do you agree or disagree that a hiring decision should have been

made without consensus among all three team members? Are there any additional steps

or considerations the hiring manager could have taken with Hamrick?

4. Based on the recruiting and selection processes used, do you believe the hiring manager

was prepared to make a hiring decision? Why or why not?

© 2008 Society for Human Resource Management. Alan Cabelly, Ph.D.

Selecting Employees Without Getting into Legal Trouble

Selection involves deciding which of the people who have been recruited will be selected to work

in the organization. The selection process has management and legal consequences that must be

taken into account before making final selections. Getting the most qualified individual for each

position is a major goal, as is hiring people in fair and legal ways. A good hiring process will

prevent possible litigation as well as other problems that can occur later on when an organization

hires the wrong people.

Selecting people to work in an organization takes into consideration both objective criteria and

the judgment of experienced managers. Objective criteria include whether the applicant's

qualifications are reliably and validly linked to the needs of the organization. Judgment criteria

deal more with the perception and observations of the managers hiring the individual. Both

objective and judgment criteria are essential to a good selection decision.

Looming over the entire selection process are three questions:

1. Who is best qualified to work in this particular position?

2. Who best will help the organization meet its goals?

3. Is the selection process fair and equitable, and does the selection process follow EEO

guidelines?

Who is best qualified is not an easy question. The best-qualified person may not be the best

person to help the organization meet its goals. What if there is an employee at a restaurant who

is acknowledged by everyone there as the fastest and most efficient employee? Her productivity

is greater than any other individual who works there. That employee, however, is constantly

complaining and creating problems with other employees and is known to steal food from the

restaurant. She is the best-qualified employee from the standpoint of doing the job, but she may

hinder the overall organization in meeting its goals.

Whether the selection process is fair and equitable may end up being decided by a court of law,

so human resources managers must be aware of how EEO guidelines affect the hiring process.

Courts require that the selection process be valid. Being valid means that the selection process

is using data that shows that the skills being used as selection criteria are needed for a person to

do the job. It may not be a valid selection criterion if there is a requirement that a person needs

a college degree to work on an assembly line. What a person learns in college may not relate to

the skills they need to work on an assembly line.

Reliability means that the selection instruments for getting the job consistently measure the

same. If a person takes a test for a job, they should be able to take the same or a similar test

later and get the same test score.

If an organization is going to use a test to determine qualifications for a position, they should

make sure the test is both valid and reliable. It can be very expensive to hire a consultant to

prove that the test is job-related so that it can be considered valid and reliable. Many

organizations have overcome the validity problem with tests by using tests for common positions

(police, fire, computer skills, etc.). These tests are readily available from various consulting firms

that have already proven the validity and reliability of that test for that particular position. Other organizations have done away with tests altogether and rely solely on interviews for selection

purposes. The courts do not question the validity of interviews as critically as they do pen-and-

paper tests.

https://learn.umgc.edu/d2l/le/content/623947/viewContent/25090928/View

Application forms and biographical data may predict how well a person might perform a job, so

application forms and biographical data can be shown to have validity in some cases. The

predictability seems to be higher in weighted application blanks (WABs) and in biographical

information blanks (BIBs). Research has been done on both WABs and BIBs that shows the

validity of the questions used for the specific jobs for which the questions were screening.

General application forms may not be valid and may ask questions that could be the basis for

lawsuits. An example of a common question that is on most general application forms is asking

for the date someone graduated from high school. Using this date, a manager could determine

an applicant's age. It is illegal to make a negative hiring decision based on someone being over

the age of 40, because of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA). Someone who did

not get the job could claim that the reason was that the hiring person(s) could tell they were

over 40. It is best to ask only for information that is directly related to the job, because if you

know things about the person that are unrelated to the job, the person may claim that you

discriminated against them because of the information you knew.

Reference checks are advisable and was discussed last week, they can be helpful in preventing

negligent hiring. However, they often do not yield any useful information. Several successful

lawsuits have been made against former managers who gave former employees bad references

without having information to back up the bad references. As a manager, it is advisable not to

give any information out about someone who has worked for you without records to prove that

what you say is true. Because of this threat, most managers will not give more information than

things that are a matter of record, such as the dates a person worked for the organization and

the number of days that person was absent from work. It is also advisable for an employer to

check on the accuracy of any educational pursuits by checking on transcripts.

Many tests eliminate minorities at a rate that is higher than that at which they eliminate

Caucasians. This may be related to the tests being culturally biased in favor of the typical

Caucasian cultural experience, or it may be because some minorities have poorer educational

opportunities in their early lives. This bias in testing can cause a disparate impact on some

protected status groups. If the test can be proven valid for the specific job being hired for, the

courts may accept this disparate impact as being acceptable because the test is job-related. Be

aware that the courts may be suspicious of culture-related tests, especially personality tests or

tests that are based on behavior traits.

Performance tests that are designed to simulate the type of work a person will be doing if they

are hired tend to have good predictive validity. This is especially true if these performance tests

are part of an evaluation by an assessment center. Assessment centers use a number of tools to

test a person's ability to do a particular job. Among these tools are in-basket exercises, problem

analyses, group-interaction evaluation, presentations by the applicant, and role-playing

exercises. These tests may be combined with paper-and-pen tests to gain a greater

understanding of the job applicant's abilities.

The courts do not usually hold interviews to validity standards that are as strict as those used for

tests for two reasons:

1. Interviews usually occur later in the hiring process, so all of the people who make it to the interview stage are usually qualified to do the job.

2. Interviews involve judgment by managers who may have expertise about a particular job that the courts do not have, so the courts do not want to second-guess the judgment of someone who has more knowledge about the job than the courts have.

The main types of interviews are:

• structured interviews in which all applicants are asked the same questions

• panel interviews in which several people from the organization interview the candidate at the same time

• situational interviews in which an applicant is asked what they would do in a particular situation

• behavioral interviews in which the applicant is asked how they have acted in the past in a setting that relates to the job for which they are being interviewed

• stress interviews in which the interviewer puts the interviewee under pressure to see how the interviewee handles that pressure

Interviews may lead to more discrimination than tests because more human judgment is used.

Human judgment is subject to biases and to trying to fit the person to the position. By having a

predetermined image of what type of person will fit a position, or an organization, an interviewer

may unintentionally discriminate against someone, especially if the interviewee has a trait that is

easily observable, such as race, gender, disability, or age—all protected statuses. The selection

process involves selecting the best person to do a particular job, but it also involves making sure

the organization is being fair, equitable, valid, and reliable in the assessment of those individuals

it hires.