The Definitive Guide to Recruiting in Good Times and Bad

Claudio  Fernández-Aráoz; Boris  Groysberg; Nitin   Nohria

Article | Harvard Business Review | May 2009

The Definitive Guide to Recruiting in Good Times and Bad

by Claudio Fernández-Aráoz, Boris Groysberg and Nitin Nohria

Abstract

This article includes a one-page preview that quickly summarizes the key ideas and provides an overview of how the concepts work in practice along with suggestions for further reading. Few companies are thinking about hiring right now, but that's a mistake. If history is any guide, staffing will become a front-burner issue once the economic upheaval eases. Even now, companies are running into staffing problems in emerging markets, and many will have to find talented replacements for baby-boom retirees. Will they be able to meet their needs? Not likely, say Fernández-Aráoz of Egon Zehnder and Harvard Business School professors Groysberg and Nohria. Their research, conducted with scores of CEOs, HR executives, and recruiters, found current hiring practices to be haphazard at best and inept at worst. And no wonder. Ignorant of their staffing needs, most companies treat hiring top-level executives as an emergency. That leaves them little choice. One study found that nearly a quarter of the time, the executive selected was the only candidate considered. Far too few companies conduct reference checks; far too many rely on gut reactions when judging qualifications and cultural fit. Hardly anyone considers whether candidates will be good team players. And, shockingly, only half of the top managers recruited by the companies studied were interviewed by anyone in the C-suite. The result: About a third of promising new hires depart within three years of being recruited. As a remedy, the authors offer their best thinking about state-of-the-art hiring practices for the top levels of the organization. Their recommendations cover the entire hiring cycle in seven steps: anticipating the need for new hires, specifying the job, developing a pool of candidates, assessing the candidates, closing the deal, integrating the newcomer, and reviewing hire-process effectiveness. Whatever the future brings, firms that follow these practices successfully will have a distinct advantage over their shortsighted competitors.

Keywords: Talent and Talent Management; Economic Slowdown and Stagnation; Recruitment; Selection and Staffing; Management Practices and Processes; Managerial Roles;

Format: Print

11 pages

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Citation:

Fernández-Aráoz, Claudio, Boris Groysberg, and Nitin Nohria. "The Definitive Guide to Recruiting in Good Times and Bad." Harvard Business Review 87, no. 5 (May 2009): 74–84.

Case | HBS Case Collection | September 2020

Lojas Americanas: Project DNA and the 'People Machine'

Boris Groysberg, Eric Lin and Sarah L. Abbott

Lojas Americanas (“Americanas”) was one of the largest retailers in Brazil. Via its stores, digital platform and Innovation Engine, the company served more than 38 million people. In recent years, Americanas had enjoyed rapid growth; growing from 98 stores in 2001 to 1,700 stores in 2019. As each store had its own manager, and there was a growing need for district and regional managers, meeting these human resource needs had become an increasingly large challenge. Compounding this, one of the company’s core talent management principles was that store managers should be hired from inside the company. This challenge was the genesis for what became known as Project DNA. Via Project DNA Americanas executives aimed to: determine empirically the extent to which store managers impacted store performance; identify those characteristics that differentiated a good manager from an average one; and create a leadership training program to develop and reinforce those characteristics. To date, approximately 1,500 managers had participated in the training, and while it was still early days, initial results had been impressive. The question for Americanas’ management was: what could be done to improve and update the project? And, could the learnings of Project DNA be applied elsewhere?

Keywords: retail; Brazil; Data Analytics; training; growth and development; Data and Data Sets; Analysis; Training; Performance; Employees; Management; Retail Industry; Brazil;

Citation:

Groysberg, Boris, Eric Lin, and Sarah L. Abbott. "Lojas Americanas: Project DNA and the 'People Machine'." Harvard Business School Case 421-038, September 2020. View Details

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In the summer of 2020, Jan Swartz, President of Princess Cruises, was persevering to lead her company back from the depths of the COVID-19 Pandemic. Diamond Princess, one of Princess Cruises’ 18 ships was the site of one of the earliest large outbreaks of COVID-19 outside of China. The outbreak led to hundreds of cases, at least a dozen deaths, media scrutiny, government investigations, and legal proceedings. In early March 2020, Swartz made the decision to pause all global operations of her company, the first cruise company to do so. Six months later, how could Princess Cruises restart operations safely and profitably?

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