Talent Practices at the Home Depot Home Depot Questions

Discuss how the leadership at Home Depot intended to use its organizational talent to gain a competitive advantage in the Do it Yourself industry.

Home Depot has revenues of over $90 billion, is the number one home improvement retailer globally, and is the second largest retailer overall. It was founded in 1979 and is now international (www.homedepot.com). The way they have chosen to use their own organizational talent to gain a clear competitive edge is by promoting from within, 80% of their leadership placements are internal, and allow the expertise of individuals who have worked in multiple departments to grow into higher level management positions. In particular, Home Depot endeavors to hire any vacancies at the supervisor, assistant manager, and store manager level from within. They believe that this ensures that not only the company culture is served, but that the expertise gleaned by promotion into increasingly higher levels of responsibility allows for a more robust and expert managerial level (Silzer and Dowell, 655-6).

Question: Discuss the key channels that Home Depot developed for recruiting talent.

Home Depot has, in fact, created quite a number of diverse and creative channels of entry into their overall business model. Because their business is sometimes seasonal (e.g. more during holidays...

These individuals are hired, trained, and groomed for a number of functional leadership programs, and Home Depot tries hard to ensure that individuals who merit promotion are identified and given the opportunities to excel within the company (Ibid., 656).
Question: Discuss the critical programs used by Home Depot to keep talent in their pipeline. Home Depot hires regularly, has almost 300,000 associates globally, and attracts as much talent as possible. Within their structure, they embed the values and focus they need for human capital, while insisting that at every step of the way, new employees are immersed within the culture that it is sale associate primarily that creates the customer service, and therefore must engender the appropriate training and organizational values. As a corporation, Home Depot is attuned to the market, understands that the marketplace is diverse, employees needs are diverse, and that there are a myriad of hierarchical needs that must be met in order to keep a happy workforce (Ibid., p. 656). One of these particular needs is understanding that employees are not always motivated by monetary gain, but often by the type and quality of management engendered in the workplace. This is particularly true as the data shows that new or talented employees tend to leave a position…