Corporate strategy on staffing

Corporate Strategy on Staffing

In order to create a staffing strategy, the organization must analyze the role that staffing will have its strategic mission. The company is a large defense contractor with ambitions towards being the number one defense contractor in the United States. Staffing needs in the industry are characterized by two key drivers. The first is the need for high level engineering talent. This talent is relatively scarce and therefore expensive. Because of its scarcity it is a source of competitive advantage for the firms that possess an abundance of it. In order to achieve the company's strategic objective of becoming the number one defense contractor, more of this talent will need to be acquired.

The second characteristic of a valuable hire in this industry is security clearance. Security clearance can dictate that type and quality of work that any employee can perform. Thus, the employee's value derives in part from their security clearance. At times in the past, bidding wars have emerged for talent based solely on security clearance (Monroe, 2009).

These two key drivers dictate the hiring strategy. In order to become the biggest firm in the industry, we will need the talent level, security clearance and government contacts to drive business growth. This type of talent cannot be found, in general, from graduate schools or from outside the industry. Generally the top level talent comes either from within the defense industry or from government or military sources. Thus, the staffing strategy should emphasize two things. One is searching for these employees where they currently work. The other is offering the compensation packages and assignments that will attract these workers. They expect to be paid; the assignments are likely the key since high-achieving workers want projects that showcase their abilities.

This staffing approach would deliver a competitive talent advantage to the company because key talent would be attracted to the firm. This talent would also be retained by virtue of the challenging work. Other firms would have a paucity of quality talent, which would make it difficult for them to successfully manage new products, compared with our firm.

2. The resource-based view holds that companies can gain sustainable competitive advantage by not only having superior resources but by isolating them, preventing their diffusion throughout the industry (12 Manage, 2009). This view has influenced my chosen strategy significantly.

In the defense industry, there only a handful of key resources. Most firms are well-financed, so that is unlikely to ever be a source of sustainable competitive advantage for our firm. However, talent can be. Top flight talent is required to develop the technologies needed by the customer. Moreover, many of the projects require a high level of security clearance. Therefore, security clearance limits who can effectively work in the industry. Our firm's strategy is built around the notion that if we can corner the market on quality employees, the limited talent pool will make it impossible for competitors to match our competitive advantage in talent.

This fits perfectly with the resource-based view of the organization. We will set out to acquire -- via compensation packages and stimulating work assignments -- talent from our competitors, the military and government. Then we will focus our efforts on retention, keeping such workers out of the hands of our competition. This isolation strategy should yield a workforce that our competition simply cannot match.

3. While it is expected that the core of this strategy will not change significantly, the first change will come in the early phases of the expansion. We will need to place increasing emphasis on retention rather than attraction. Poaching in the industry is rampant, so we need to ensure that our employees are not only well-compensated but are exceptionally happy. When firms were poaching federal employees for their security clearance, it was the inherent unhappiness of those employees with their current work conditions that allowed the poaching to happen. So if we bring employees on board with promises of stimulating work, that work must be provided.

As the company matures, the staffing strategy will need to shift back to finding new recruits. The company will always be driven by technology, but acquiring senior staff from our competitors, the government and the military is costly. We need to place some emphasis on bringing talent through the system. It can take a decade or more to develop top talent, but developing skilled people in-house is essentially to sustaining our talent growth and in turn maintaining a competitive advantage in talent.