Chapters One & Two

Competitve advantage

something that a company can do differently from its competitors that allows it to perform better, survive, and succeed in its industry

Traditional staffing

less tied to strategy, more reactive and likely to be done in response to an opening, and lacks continuous improvement effort

Strategic staffing

to do something differently from its competitors, firms need to attract, acquire, and retain people who can do that

Components of strategic staffing

Workforce planning, sourcing talent, recruiting talent, selecting talent, acquiring talent*, deploying talent*, and retaining talent

Acquiring talent

putting together job offers that appeal to chosen candidates and persuading job offer recipients to accept those job offers

Deploying talent

assigning people to appropriate jobs and roles in the organization to best utilize their talents

Staffing process goals

during the hiring process; attracting sufficient numbers of appropriately qualified applicants, complying with the law and organizational policies, meeting hiring timeline, and achieving cost efficiency

Staffing outcome goals

after hire; hiring successful employees, reducing turnover rates, meeting stakeholder needs, maximizng the financial return on the firm’s staffing investment, and enhancing employee diversity and organizational flexibility

Strategy

set of goal-directed actions a firm takes to gain and sustain competitive advantage

Cost leadership strategy

also operational excellence; major business strategy; be the lowest cost producer for a particular level of product quality

Differentiation

product leadership or innovation; major business strategy; produce products that makes target customers for whom the firm creates value perceive as being different in ways that are important

Specialization/focus or customer intimacy

minor business strategy; tailor and shape products and services to fit each customer’s needs & objective is long-term customer loyaltly and long-term customer profitability

Growth

corporate strategy; expands the company to either increase the firm’s sales or allow the company to achieve economies of scale

Resource-based view of the firm

proposes that a company’s resources and competencies can produce a sustained competitive advantage by creating value for customers by lowering costs, providing something of unique value, or some combination of the two

Types of business strategies

cost-leadership, differentiation, specialization, and growth

Strategic staffing decisions

core vs flexible, hire internally vs externally, hire for vs train and develop, replace vs retain, levels of which skills, proactively vs reactively, job focus, investment vs cost, and centralized vs decentralized

VRINO criteria

valuable, rare, costly to Imitate, non-substitutable, and organized

Operational excellence

maximizing the efficiency of the manufacturing or product development process to minimize