ORG 535 Wk 3 – Practice: Training and Development

Interviewing Candidates

The interview is the most widespread selection method used to fill positions in organizations. Unfortunately, research on employment interviews has shown that, without proper care, interviews can be unreliable, low in validity, and biased against different groups. One way to improve the interview process is for HR staff to keep the interview structured, standardized, and focused on accomplishing a small number of goals. Moreover, using situational interviews—where applicants are confronted with specific issues, questions, or problems that are likely to arise on the job—have provided pertinent information about the way an applicant may handle the job he or she is applying to fill. In the following case, a local small business is overwhelmed by responses to a job posting and asks an HR consultant to assist in the selection process.

In this exercise, please read the mini-case and answer the questions that follow.

David Holmes is an HR consultant hired by Beds O’ Plenty (BOP), a local mattress company. BOP is a fairly new business that has grown dramatically in the past year. BOP needs to expand its customer service group and is looking to hire two customer service representatives. The HR manager (who also doubles as the head of customer service) is overwhelmed by the response to the company’s job opening posted on CareerBuilder.com. The current customer service reps are relatives of the company’s owner, and they signed on as a favor to him—even though they had little professional experience in customer service. Now that the department needs to expand, the owner and the HR manager need guidance in setting up a formal selection method for the new employees.

Sweet Success: Strategic Training and Development

In today’s business, a company’s investment in training and development activities goes beyond the belief that it is simply a good thing to do. Training and development activities are becoming more strategic. That is, they are increasingly used to develop intellectual capital and to address business needs related to learning, behavior change, and performance improvement. Training and development activities are used to contribute to business strategy and help companies reach their goals. The strategic training and development process includes linking a company’s business strategy to strategic training and development initiatives and actions, and identifying metrics or standards that could be used to determine whether training and development activities actually contribute to business goals and objectives related to the business strategy. This case shows how Just Born, maker of Peeps, Mike & Ike, Hot Tamales, and other candies, engages in strategic training and development to support its business strategy.

In this exercise, please read the mini-case and answer the questions that follow.

Just Born has three business objectives: improve sales, profits, and leadership. Just Born wants to obtain aggressive growth and above-average profitability through superior leadership. It has implemented several business strategies to reach these objectives, including growing the brands, expanding into international markets, diversifying, reducing supply chain costs, establishing effective procurement, and developing a market-driven scorecard.

The Just Born People Development System is designed to ensure that learning and development align with the business strategy and drive business results. Each year, associates at Just Born create learning plans based on performance evaluations and development plans. The associate and supervisor agree upon four personal objectives that will help achieve departmental objectives and two competencies that need improvement. Using the corporate competency dictionary, the associate and manager develop a learning plan. The learning plans are collected and used to develop a corporate learning matrix, which is used to build the corporate learning plan. At the end of the year, merit pay increases are based on the achievement of performance objectives, as well as the learning plan.

Just Born has more than fifty internal trainers who offer customized training to meet the learning needs of associates at all levels of the company. Just Born also offers a leadership program for managers. In this program managers learn fundamental leadership skills in addition to learning the Wow…Now Improvement Process. This process teaches a systematic way to make process improvements and deliver business results. Managers work in teams on a business problem involving data collection and analysis of decision-making and processes. At the end of the training, the managers present to the executive team and trainers what they learned, the tools they used, and the business results of their projects. At Just Born, the impact of learning the business is measured by business results including growth and above average profitability. Also, use of the improvement process by managers in the leadership program has resulted in more than two million dollars in cost savings.

Just Born managers encourage employees to complete action plans as a way to