Organizational Recruitment Recruitment Failures for an Unnamed Retail Giant

The quality of a professional organization will be deeply and directly contingent upon the quality of the personnel that it employs. Such is to say that a company's success begins with its recruitment strategy, where the manner in which it shapes and conveys its demands to applying candidates will be critical to the screening and vetting processes. It is this recruitment strategy that will determine not just who a company hires but, indeed, who among its employees are likely to become long-term assets or to advance within an organization. For the purposes of this discussion, we will consider the recruitment policies of a leading global retail chain. For proprietary reasons, we will refrain from identifying this firm by name, but the discussion will demonstrate how negative recruitment strategies can be connected to poor public image performance and a poor record on working conditions.

The retail chain selected for evaluation is one that has achieved a great deal of economic success by appealing to a low-cost, low-price model. However, many of the benefits of its operation "are offset primarily by [the company's] poor public image. This is also [the company's] biggest opportunity -- improving public image." (Nester 2006, p. 1) Findings suggest that improvements in recruitment could have a strong bearing on bringing about this improvement.

Quality personnel orientation begins with the designation of effective recruitment methods but these must also be connected to positive labor practices....

The company selected for evaluation here has appealed for most of its existence to a recruitment strategy which courts low-wage workers who are willing to work long hours without benefits, at a poor pay rate when compared to other retailers and in a context where morale is routinely quite low. This denotes a strategy largely aimed at those on the bottom skill and motivation rungs of the employment ladder. However, evidence drawn from other retailers with a similar product orientation suggests that the company might yield better results by improving its labor orientation and, consequently, using this improvements to drive more ambitious recruitment.
For company in question, these are concerns which must be considered as directly affiliated with the parallel concerns of increased competition in the global mega-retail scheme as well as its much assailed reputation as a frequent offender of labor law and/or principle. These contribute to an overall spiral in quality, with its diminished market share reflecting the impression that employees with emergent competitors such as Target are treated far better, paid slightly better and more likely therefore to be knowledgeable, qualified and reflective of a positive brand image. (Clark et al. 2006, p. 4) While it is not empirically clear that this is factual, the existence of the impression tends to benefit Target, which is therefore seen ultimately as a chain of slightly higher quality and retail appeal than the unnamed competitor. This is illustrative of the opportunity currently being missed by the company in question, whose ultimate disregard for…