Problem
Case Study: British Airways
British Airways (BA) has the largest centralised commercial recruitment operation in the United Kingdom, recruiting nearly 5,000 people each year. A team of only ninety people, supported by a mainframe computer system, has the rather arduous task of handling 72,000 applications, 13 000 job applicants, and 169,000 unsolicited inquiries-all for a workforce of 50,000 employees.
At the beginning of the 1990s, senior human resource executives at BA took significant steps to deal with changes they had observed in the labour market. For some time, it had been increasingly difficult to find skilled recruits in areas such as information technology, finance, and engineering. In addition, there had been a clear downturn in the supply of skilled young people. All of these trends were occurring side-by-side with an increase, driven by business growth, in demand for skilled labour.
The widening gap between supply and demand led to the creation of a recruitment marketing team within BA. The primary purpose of the team was to ensure consistency in the promotion of BA as a first-choice employer and to extend the company's customer -focused approach to the recruitment field.
The team's first priority was to apply some basic customer service principles to the recruitment operation as a whole. Having identified that there were, in fact, two customers for recruitment - external applicants and line managers - the team drew up basic guidelines and targets for measuring the quantity, quality, timing, and cost of services provided to each. Within career service, measures were developed to ensure excellent responses to telephone inquiries (e.g., answer all calls within twenty seconds) and graduate recruitment (e.g., acknowledgement of receipt of a candidate's application within three days).
In addition to establishing quality standards, BA also developed four different training programs for line managers to help increase their understanding of the recruitment marketplace, emphasize the importance of equal opportunity in recruitment, and improve their basic skills in assessment and selection. This training was a crucial element of BA's strategy of meeting the needs of the airline while simultaneously reducing the head count in the recruitment department itself. As a consequence of the re-organisation and training, many of the traditional HR functions were handed over to line managers themselves.
In order to promote BA as first-choice employer, the company worked with Barkers Advertising to develop a recruitment advertising style that was consistent with the company's 40 million advertising budget. The philosophy was to convey a consistent corporate message while targeting different niches, especially for positions that were difficult to fill.
In their efforts to promote BA as first choice among employers, the recruitment department made special efforts to maintain a delicate balance between projecting the genuine opportunities of working for a company of the size and diversity of British Airways and the tendency to paint too rosy a picture of the realities of life within a large corporation. This was seen as especially important since retaining talented employees in a diminishing labour market was perhaps more important than attracting them in the first place. These efforts at BA are indicative of the company's overall effort to build a more flexible and capable workforce. Flexibility and capability are two vital ingredients in the company's strategy to become a world -class carrier in the airline industry.
Task
1. Discuss the relationship between strategy, human resource planning and recruitment at British Airways.
2. Do you agree with the British Airways' decision to shift responsibility for recruitment and selection over to line managers? Critically debate.