Lenovo Group Ltd.: Recruitment, Selection, and Training - Case Study Example

Lenovo Group Ltd. Recruitment, Selection, and Training Lenovo Group Ltd. Recruitment, Selection, and Training Brief description of Lenovo Group Ltd Lenovo, a multinational computer technology company founded in Beijing in 1984 by a group of engineers and was later registered in Hong Kong, has its headquarters located in China, North Carolina, Beijing, Morrisville, and the United States (Ling and Avery, 2006). The company deals with designing, developing, manufacturing, and selling of personal computers, smart phones, electronic storage devices, IT management software, as well as smart televisions. The company became publicly traded in 1994 under Hong Kong listing and raised thirty million US dollars. The public holds Fifty-eight percent of its shares, 34% by the Leng Holdings Ltd, and 8% by its entities. It holds 13.5 percent of the Global computer market as per the October 2011 report (Businessweek.com, 2014). The company’s operations are in more than sixty countries and sell to around one hundred and sixty countries in the world. Remarkably, the company has been involved with mergers and acquisition with various companies. In 2005, Lenovo acquired IBM that deals with personal computers, and the acquisition not only accelerated access to foreign markets, but also improved technology and branding (Voon, 2012). It operates as a joint venture with NEC producing personal PCs for the Japanese market as well as NEC Company, which specializes in network-attached storage solutions. Lenovo started hiring employees in summer 1988 who were college graduates. Analysis of Lenovo’s effectiveness in recruiting efforts Recruitment is the process involve in hiring suitable candidates to fill in a job vacancy in an organization (Brown, 2011). Lenovo utilizes both external and internal recruitment strategies where it has appointed various experts who oversee the overall recruitment process to ensure success in their recruitment efforts. The company makes use of employee referral, which involves communicating the vacant position to the employees who are then requested to endorse probable applicants for the job offered who are either expected to be their former workmates, competent relatives, and fellow college graduates. This relieves the company the burden of advertising the jobs, but has a major disadvantage of portraying Lenovo as an organization that does not offer equal opportunities to potential employees because only those who are familiar to the employers stand the chance to get the jobs offered by the company. Additionally, employee referral process is prone to biasness as a staff stands a chance to influence the allocation of the job opportunity. Lenovo is also involved in executive search recruitment involving a third party recruiter who searches for candidates from companies for executive positions where qualifications are high and rare to find suitable candidates. It is effective in that it cuts training costs, but there are chances of losing the employee since the same recruiter may hunt him again for another company. Lateral hiring is another effort that has been adopted by Lenovo involves luring competent professionals from other competing organizations with higher salaries and promising them better career opportunities, which implies that the company gets employees from competing firms and positions them in similar ranks in their operation (Ling & Avery, 2006). This is effective in that it hires already experienced employees minimizing supervision and training costs. Conversely, may be perceived as an unethical organizational behavior because it is believed that these employees will be lured to give out the secret strategies of their former organization; hence, unfair competition in the market. Subsequently, the unethical behavior creates tension between Lenovo and the competitors who may also lure Lenovo’s employees depriving its competency in the market. On the verge to ensure that the company only gets competent staff it further undertakes on campus recruitment where it sends recruiters to colleges to interview prospective employees. Lenovo is able to promote its products in the colleges done by paying school fees for less-advantaged students, holding seminars, offering internship, and funding students’ projects, which attracts students to apply for jobs in Lenovo after graduating; hence, taking advantage of younger and energetic minds. Lenovo move to ensure that its recruitment is fair and transparent has further advanced to internet recruitment, which has the capability of attracting and giving job opportunities to many and diversified candidates. Internet recruitment is done when candidates from a wide geographical area are being targeted. The recruitment method is effective because the company is able to receive as many applications as possible and improves its reputation as well. However, this kind of recruitment overwhelms the human resource department given that there are too many applicants requiring a lot of time to select the suitable candidate (Brown, 2011). The company carries out internal recruitment to ensure that it motivates the workers prior to internet advertisement of executive positions. Existing employees fill in the job positions within Lenovo Group limited done through promotion, demotions, shifting employees from one department to another, or one region to another. Internal recruitment is effective and economical in that it saves the orientation expenses because employees are familiar with the operations, minimal training costs, less time in determining suitable candidate, and motivates employees particularly those who get promotions. Employment agencies are contacted by Lenovo to ensure that the recruitment process is free and fair where they receive applications from candidates and march them with the job description provided to them by company (Ling & Avery, 2006). They then refer these candidates to the company for interview, a procedure that is substantially effective in that the company saves the time it could have spent searching for these candidates. However, his method is costly because the company has to pay the agencies for every client they receive. Similarly, Lenovo involves niche recruiters where the aim of seeking narrowed specialty. These recruiting firms produce superior results given their capability of channeling all their resources into networking for a very precise skill requirement; hence, ensure that each of the company’s staff is suitable for his or her perspective position. Recommendations Lenovo has applied a number of techniques to ensure that its recruitment process is effective, fair, and free, but it has not been very effective because it is based on cost-benefit and individual performance. The company should improve a number of issues to eliminate possible situations that compromise its recruitment process including eradication of some recruitments process, attractive job posts, and closely monitor contacted recruitment agencies. The incorporation of visual ads to job advertisements attracts more candidates and ensures that only those who are familiar with the tasks apply reducing inappropriate applications. Employee referral procedure is quite inappropriate because it maintains a biased recruitment culture; hence, Lenovo should do away with the method that will help promote the trust by the public regarding job opportunities. Recruitment agencies are well acquitted to the task of recruiting employees who are competent and qualified. Nonetheless, the agencies are prone to recruitment malpractices such as bribes, and Lenovo should closely monitor the agencies they contract to ensure that the employees referred to them are qualified, which can be done by having a company’s representative in the in each agency. Analysis of Lenovo selection process Lenovo Group Ltd. has an established methods and procedure used to select the suitable candidates including interview, validation, reliability, tests, and group discussions. Preliminary interview Preliminary interview is a dominant selection technique that Lenovo has applied. Remarkably, interview as a selection method has been subjected to numerous criticism. Consequently, this has led to the need for the evaluation of the reliability and validity of every candidate by the commonly. The semi-structured interview eliminates the applicants who do not meet the minimum qualifications as per the job description. Validation Validation involves an interview that is meant to bring out the reasoning capability of the candidate, attitude, and personality and validate the professional career as well as identity of the candidate through standard questions. Reliability This is an interview conducted by the HR department to measure the consistency, and in Lenovo, only two interviewers are involved to examine the reliability of the prospective candidate. Notably, reliability test is quite challenging given that despite that interview question are standard, the answers are always different; hence, Lenovo does not effectively determine the reliability of the candidates. Tests administration Lenovo administers job knowledge tests with the aim of ensuring that the selected individual has adequate knowledge and skills to perform the task. Personality tests are administered to determine the mental ability or the candidate particularly the engineers. Group Discussions These are meant to evaluate the capability of the candidate to work as a member of a collaborative team. Questions are given to the candidates and assessed in terms of the contribution, role and enthusiasm portrayed by every individual when discussing the questions. Collaboration is a major factor that determines the success of a company; hence, Lenovo has to make sure that the candidate portrays collaborative working skills. Recommendations Lenovo selection should conduct situational judgment tests, which enable them evaluate how a candidate acts when faced with challenging situations that will help determine if the candidate is competent even tasks undertaken under pressure (Brown, 2011). Additionally, the company selection panel should include structured interviews focused to determine whether the candidates seek tow work for the company for a short-term or long-term period, which will avoid misuse of company’s funds used to train workers who only leaves the company a few months after being hired. Assessment of human resources planning and performance management systems Lenovo has enjoyed adequate staff through the human resource planning implying that it has not suffered from labor shortage (Ling & Avery, 2006). Human resource planning has enabled the company to hire qualified staff as per the job description. Consequently, it has been in a position to achieve the expected goals. Planning helps the company to forecast the future employment needs of the company. Thus advertisements are placed in advance and this help in acquiring the need staff in good time. Human resource planning has enabled Lenovo group to respond to the workforce issues such as technology, changing government legislation and the changing demographic structures. The performance management systems had placed Lenovo Group Ltd in a position to meet its goals and objectives because performance is being directed towards meeting these goals. The systems had enabled the human resource manager to identify, retain, and reward the performing employees as well as identifying poorly performing employees, after which corrective measures are employed. Additionally, the performance systems have enabled the company to access need for training and development of employees, which improves the output quality as well as the efficiency of the employees. Contribution of training and talent management to labor force Training enables the employees acquire new skills where the company is able to maintain its staff despite changes in the tasks instead of conducting new recruitments to meet the company’s modifications (Brown, 2011). In addition, training through workshops and seminars help meet the technological advancement in the world of computers, which portrays a dynamic change. Through the seminars and sponsored workshops, employees are able to acquire new knowledge and skills to cope with these changes. For example, acquisition of IBM by Lenovo in 2005 also led to distractions of employees’ roles necessitating staff training. It is significant to note that training increases employees’ job security because Lenovo is reluctant to deploy an employee after spending resources in training them. Employees feel secure after training because they feel that the company would not suck them easily (Stahl et al., 2012). The company at all means avoids replacement as this means that the new employees need to be trained. Talent management is currently one of the most important issues in corporate human resource and training (Stahl et al., 2012). It is a powerful trend in Lenovo bringing changes in the organizational culture, use of technology, and the allocation of resources. Talent managements has proved to be a tool to ensure Lenovo’s satisfaction of the number and quality of leaders that has contributed to the vast growth of the company. References Brown, J. (2011). The complete guide to recruitment (1st ed.). Philadelphia, PA: Kogan Page. Businessweek.com,. (2014). LENOVO GROUP LTD (992:Hong Kong): Company Description - Businessweek. Businessweek.com. Retrieved 10 August 2014, from http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/snapshot/snapshot_article.asp?ticker=992:HK Ling, Z., & Avery, M. (2006). The Lenovo affair (1st ed.). Singapore: John Wiley & Sons (Asia). Stahl, G., Bj"orkman, I., Farndale, E., Morris, S., Paauwe, J., & Stiles, P. et al. (2012). Six principles of effective global talent management. Sloan Management Review, 53(2), 25--42. Voon, A. (2012). Trading the China market with American depository receipts (1st ed.). Singapore: J. Wiley & Sons Singapore. Read More