Case Study

Marcus Buckingham has recently been appointed as member of the board of director for a local bank. The competitive strategy of the bank is To use superior customer service to differentiate the bank, and to thereby retain and increase number of customers, and thus boost revenues and profitability.

As a new member, Marcus was being introduced to all the employees in the home office. When he was introduced to Sara Williams, he was quite curious about her work and asked her what the machine she was using did. Sara replied that she really didnt know what the machine called or what it did. She explained that she had only been working there for two months. However, she did know precisely how to operate the machine. According to her supervisor, she is an excellent employee.

At one of the branch offices, the supervisor in charge spoke to Marcus, telling him that, something is really wrong, but she didnt know what. For one thing, she explained, employee turnover rate (the number of people leaving the organization) is very high and no sooner had one employee been put on the job than another one resigned. She had little time to work with the new employees as they came and went.

As the company doesnt have an HR unit in the home office, all branch supervisors hired their own employees without communication with the home office or other branches. When a vacancy developed, the supervisor tried to find out a suitable employee to replace the worker who had quit.

After touring 22 branches and finding the similar problems in many of them, Marcus wondered what the home office should do and what action he should take. The more he thought about the matter, the more puzzled Marcus became. He could not quite put his finger on this problem

Questions-

1. What recruitment approach does the company use? Would you suggest it a different approach? Why?