Strategic Staffing

Chapter 1
Strategic Staffing
 Learning Objectives
After studying this chapter, you should be able to:
• Understand why staffing is critical to an organization’s
performance
• Define strategic staffing and contrast it with less strategic
views of staffing
• Describe the seven components of strategic staffing
• Understand staffing goals
• Describe how staffing influences and is affected by the
other functional areas of human resource management

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 Staffing for Competitive Advantage
A competitive advantage is something that a company can
do differently from its competitors allowing it to perform better,
survive, and succeed in its industry.
Every company’s employees create, enhance, or implement
the company’s competitive advantage.
Where do these employees come from?
• It all begins with the staffing process.

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 Why Is Staffing Important?
Staffing outcomes determine who will work for and represent
the firm, and what its employees will be willing and able to
do.
Staffing influences the success of future training,
performance management, and compensation programs, as
well as the organization’s ability to execute its business
strategy.

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 What Is Strategic Staffing?
Definition: The process of staffing an organization in
future-oriented and goal-directed ways that support the
organization’s business strategy and enhance
organizational effectiveness.
This involves the movement of people into, through, and
out of the organization.

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 How Strategic Staffing Differs from
Traditional Staffing
• Traditional staffing:
– Less tied to strategy
– More reactive and likely to be done in response to an opening
– Lacks continuous improvement effort
• Strategic staffing systems incorporate:
– Longer-term planning
– Alignment with the firm’s business strategy
– Alignment with the other areas of HR
– Alignment with the labor market
– Targeted recruiting
– Sound candidate assessment on factors related to job
success and longer-term potential
– The evaluation of staffing outcomes against pre-identified
goals
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 Staffing Process

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 Seven Components of Strategic
Staffing
Table 1-1 Seven Components of Strategic Staffing
1. Workforce Planning: strategically evaluating the company’s current lines of
business, new businesses it will be getting into, businesses it will be leaving, and
the gaps between the current skills in the organization and the skills it will need to
execute its business strategy
2. Sourcing Talent: locating qualified individuals and labor markets from which to
recruit
3. Recruiting Talent: making decisions and engaging in practices that affect either
the number or types of individuals willing to apply for and accept job offers
4. Selecting Talent: assessing job candidates and deciding who to hire
5. Acquiring Talent: putting together job offers that appeal to chosen candidates,
and persuading job offer recipients to accept those job offers
6. Deploying Talent: assigning people to appropriate jobs and roles in the
organization to best utilize their talents
7. Retaining Talent: keeping successful employees engaged and committed to the
firm
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 Workforce Planning
Definition: The process of predicting an organization’s
future employment needs, and the availability of current
employees and external hires to meet those employment
needs, and execute the organization’s business strategy.
• Usually involves both, the hiring manager and a staffing
specialist.
• Can be short-term and focus on an immediate hiring need.
• Can be long-term and focus on the organization’s needs in
the future. Workforce planning is better strategically the more
it addresses both the firm’s short- and long-term needs.

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 Sourcing and Recruiting Talent
Sourcing: locating qualified individuals and labor markets
from which to recruit.
Recruiting: all organizational practices and decisions that
affect either the number or types of individuals willing to apply
for and accept job offers.
Sourcing identifies people who would be good recruits.
Recruiting activities entice them to apply to the organization
and accept job offers, if extended.

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 Selecting and Acquiring Talent
Selecting: assessing job candidates and deciding whom
to hire.
• Operates in a strong legal context.

Acquiring: involves putting together job offers that appeal

to chosen candidates, and persuading job offer recipients
to accept those job offers and to join the organization.
• Negotiations usually result in employment contracts.

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 Deploying Talent
Deploying: assigning talent to appropriate jobs and roles
in the organization.
• Succession planning and career development enhance
deployment options.
Socializing: the process of familiarizing newly hired and
promoted employees with their job, workgroup, and
organization as a whole.

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 Retaining Talent
• Succession management and career development
are effective tools.
• Turnover of high performers can be expensive.
• Turnover of low performers can be beneficial.
• Retention saves money in recruiting and hiring
replacements for those leaving.

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 Matchmaking Process
• Recruiting and selection are interdependent, two-way
processes in which both employers and recruits try to look
appealing to the other while learning as much as they can
about their potential fit.
• Applicants and organizations choose each other.
• Recruitment continues until the person is no longer a
viable job candidate, or until a job offer is accepted and
the person reports for work.
• Some firms continuously “recruit” current employees to
maintain their attractiveness as an employer and enhance
retention.
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 Staffing Goals (1 of 3)
Process Goals—during the hiring process
• Attracting sufficient numbers of appropriately qualified
applicants
• Complying with the law and organizational policies
• Fulfilling any affirmative action obligations
• Meeting hiring timeline goals
• Staffing efficiently

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 Staffing Goals (2 of 3)
Outcome Goals—after hire
• Hiring successful employees
• Hiring individuals who will be eventually promoted
• Reducing turnover rates among high performers
• Hiring individuals for whom the other HR functions will have the
desired impact
• Meeting stakeholder needs
• Maximizing the financial return on the firm’s staffing investment
• Enhancing employee diversity
• Enabling organization flexibility
• Enhancing business strategy execution
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 Staffing Goals (3 of 3)
• Should be aligned with improving the strategic performance
of the staffing system.
• The primary staffing goal is to match the competencies, styles,
values, and traits of job candidates with the requirements of
the organization and its jobs.
• Strategic staffing goes even further and enables the
organization to better execute its business strategy and attain
its business goals.
• Staffing goals should be consistent with the goals and needs of
all stakeholders in the staffing process, including applicants
and hiring managers.

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 Questions to Ask in Setting Staffing
Goals
Table 1-3 Questions to Ask When Setting Staffing Goals
• Is it more important to fill the position quickly or fill it with
someone who closely matches a particular talent profile?
• What levels of which competencies, styles, values, and traits are
really needed for job success and to execute the business
strategy?
• What is the business’s strategy and what types of people will it
need 1, 5, and 10 years from now?
• What talents must new hires possess rather than be trained to
develop?
• What are the organization’s long-term talent needs? Is it
important for the person hired to have the potential to assume
leadership roles in the future?
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 Integration With Other Areas of HR
• Training
• Performance management
• Compensation
• Succession planning
• Career development
• Recruitment impacts selection activities and the likelihood
of successfully identifying good hires

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 Internet Staffing Resources
• The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (
www.eeoc.gov)
• Electronic Recruiting Exchange (www.ere.net)
• Human Resource Planning Society (http://hrps.org)
• O*Net Center (http://online.onetcenter.org)
• Society for Human Resource Management (www.shrm.org)
• Staffing.org
• World at Work (www.worldatwork.org)

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 Discussion Questions
1. Relate a hiring experience you have had as a job
seeker to the process illustrated in Figure 1-1. What
could the organization you applied to have done to
improve your experience?
2. Assume that your organization wants to pursue a
staffing strategy of acquiring the best talent possible.
Give an example of how the firm’s ability to provide
only average pay can affect the success of this staffing
strategy.

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