Problem: Management Team Decision

Hire or Hold Out? When your systems engineer left to have a baby, you had no idea how hard it would be to replace her.171 You'd heard the labor market for engineers was tight, but you thought it wouldn't be too tough to fi nd a new hire for a company as well known as Raytheon. That was 6 months ago. Today, your team is sitting down again with another crop of 200 résumés to compare against the job specifications: Ph.D. in science or computer engineering; experience in manufacturing; knowledge of the manufacturing software you use and of Pro/Engineer Wildfire, a computer-aided design (CAD) software package; able to get top-secret government security clearance; willingness to relocate to Waltham, Massachusetts, where Raytheon is headquartered; and more technical competency requirements. Really, when you look over the list, you don't think the requirements are that stringent, particularly when you consider that Raytheon designs and manufactures aircraft, missile systems, and intelligence and information systems for the U.S. Department of Defense. And your pool of applicants is nowhere near that of some other companies.

Microsoft receives 60,000 résumés a month, but it has only 2,000 openings for software development jobs. Of the 100,000 résumés it received from graduating students last year, it screened only 15,000, interviewed 3,500, and hired 1,000. Come to think of it, though, your chances of getting hired at Microsoft are better than your chances of fi lling your systems engineer opening. As you sit down with your team and begin to sift through the 200 résumés, you see right away that 100 don't have a Ph.D. Of the remaining 100 candidates, 40 wouldn't be able to get security clearance, 23 are overqualified, and 18 don't have manufacturing experience, and 10 only have experience on 2001, an earlier version of the CAD software. So out of your 200 applicants, only 9 are left, and you haven't even broached the question about relocating. You've gone through seven similar piles of résumés in the past 6 months. The whole point of specifying the exact qualifications you want in an applicant was to save time getting the person up and running at the company. Maybe you'd have been better off loosening up the requirements and developing appropriate training programs. What if none of the applicants left standing after this round wants to relocate? Then you'll be starting with another pile next month-or sooner. Form a team of four to five students to play the role of the hiring team at Raytheon and work through the following questions to come to a decision.

Questions: 1. What are the risks to keeping the job requirements tightly structured?

2. What are the risks of loosening up the job specifications?

3. How would loosening up the job specifications affect your training needs?

4. Do you hire an applicant who meets a good number of the job requirements and is generally compatible with the corporate culture; or do you wait for the perfect candidate, even if that means another 6 months of interviewing?