Organizations have to consider several decisions in order to execute and develop staffing strategies. The first decision is whether Chern’s should form a core or flexible sales associate workforce. For Chern’s company, the core workforce would be more beneficial compared to flexible one, as the employees are central to what company produces and considered to be long-term contributors to the company. Chern’s would want to retain valuable workers for long-term contribution to the company. Next decision is to hire internally or externally.
The reasonable decision for Chern’s case is to combine both internal and external talent focuses. The internal hiring allows current employees to be promoted faster as they are already familiar with the company’s culture and the work they should do. It is a big advantage for Chern’s company as if the store manager position is opened, then the company has already had a pool of internal candidates who they have assessed and aware of their performance. Nevertheless, the company should also look for external candidates, as they bring diverse, fresh ideas with most updated technology and trends that can be beneficial for Chern’s company. Another strategic staffing decision is whether the company wants to hire experienced workers with competencies or just train them instead. At Chern’s, attributes and abilities are more important than knowledge and skills, as knowledge and skills can be trained at the company; attributes and personal qualities are very hard to teach as it is derived from the person.
Hiring an experienced worker with wrong work attitude will negatively affect company and customers. Thus, the company should train the employees to ensure that all the skill and attributes match the job requirements. It is much better to retain the employees because it is difficult to find new staff with Chern’s job standards and will cost more for training new people. In this case, Chern’s should continue to develop the talent of current employees as they are aware of company’s core values and have a better understanding of company’s products and services.
In order to do that, the company would need to offer workers with more beneficial plans (retirement plan, holiday packages, etc.) as a strategy of keeping longer-term employees. As for sales associate workforce at Chern’s it is important to recruit the individuals with specific skills in sales industry that will help the company to grow. The main skills and abilities required for sales associates are customer service skill, sales and marketing skills, product knowledge as well as knowledge of company’s rules and regulations. There are other important skills that need to be considered such as good communication skill, computer literacy and positive attitude at work are basic requirements for hiring sales assistants and can be strengthened throughout the training process. Chern’s should staff the sales positions proactively for the company to fill the future positions at the right moment without having to hire quickly at the last moment, which can cause hiring discrimination and failure in recruiting right candidates.
Another important aspect of staffing strategy is to identify what type of jobs should be focused on. Chern’s should focus more on hiring high-performing employees who will add value to the company as well as providing outstanding customer service to keep the customers loyal for life. The staffing process can be very expensive and it is wrong to consider it as a cost to be minimized. Chern’s sees staffing as an investment to the company because spending money on hiring, training and retaining talent would have a positive effect on company’s productivity, higher performance and can reduce the recruiting cost. Investing in retaining employees will help Chern’s to cut hiring, training costs and staffing expenditure due to fewer vacancies. Chern’s active business growth strategy with 140 stores in 28 states on the East Coast and in the Midwest, it is beneficial to have both decentralized and centralized staffing (combined approach) to standardize staffing metrics and minimize redundancies.
Also, it helps staffing personnel to build a more efficient relationship with hiring managers as they report directly to them.
