HRM373: TechLead is a company that focuses on technological product development and services for e-commerce organizations: Assessment and Selection Assignment, SUSS, Singapore

TechLead is a company that focuses on technological product development and services for e-commerce organizations. In just a short time, it has grown to a size of 40 today.  In the last few months, it received a substantial capital injection to expand the company.  The CEO (one of the founders) wants to hire 20 IT specialists in the next 2 months. Because of the company’s growth, you have been hired to assist the HR manager to perform HR functions, with a priority to help with the recruitment and selection of the 20 IT specialists.

• In the last 1.5 years, 30 IT specialists were hired. The number of job applicants was about 300 with many different qualifications, both local and overseas.
• The online application form asked for the job applicants’ information such as name, gender, age, citizenship, marital status, religion, photo, contact details, educational background, IT experience, and referees.
• The CEO and HR manager interviewed 80% of the job applicants who applied. The 20% who were not interviewed either did not respond to the invitation for an interview (5%) or were rejected (15%) because they did not provide all the information requested in the application form.
• At each interview, the CEO would pose different IT questions to different applicants to assess their IT knowledge and intelligence, while the HR manager would ask her favorite question “what are your strengths and weaknesses?”
• At the end of each interview, the CEO would decide on the suitability of the applicant on a 5-point scale based on the applicant’s answers to the questions.
• For the selection decision-making over the last 1.5 years, job applicants who were rated “5” or “4” were offered employment whenever there was a need to fill a position.
• The 20 new IT specialists that the company plans to hire will perform similar work to the 30 who had been hired.
• The CEO informed you that he wants better quality hires as the 3 team leaders of the 30 IT specialists had complained that a number of them were not performing – a few could hardly write programs using JavaScript and a number lacked “attention to detail” and teamwork which is important to cut down errors and delays. The CEO also told you that he will be too busy to conduct interviews and is prepared to increase the existing budget for selection by 50% so as to select good IT specialists.

Question 1

From the narrative, identify and justify the job performance criteria and work-related characteristics (WRCs) of the job.

Question 2

Analyze the efficiency and fairness of the selection system. Describe and justify your analysis with supporting facts/reasons.

Question 3

Analyze the effectiveness of the interview that was used and the processing of the data.

Question 4

Based on the issues identified from the above questions, propose and defend four practical and specific improvements to the selection system. Also, recommend any follow-up study that might be useful.