MT140 Unit 5 Staffing Case Analysis Example

Nine Seasonal Photographers Gone by Mid-September: A Unit 5 Staffing Case Analysis

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

MT140: Introduction to Management

Unit 5 Staffing Case Analysis

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

Larkspur School Portraits, its hiring process and every figure are composite and illustrative; the sources cited are real.

The Case

Larkspur School Portraits hires seasonal photographers each summer to cover fall picture days from mid-August through October. Last year it hired twenty-four. Nine left by September 15, seven of them in their first two weeks of shooting. The posted job description, written years ago, called the job "seasonal photographer" and listed "photographing students in a school setting, flexible schedule, photography experience a plus." Exit comments from six of the nine mentioned early starts, heavy equipment and the pace of photographing children.

The Staffing Process

Robbins and Coulter (2021) describe staffing as a sequence: analyzing the job, recruiting candidates, selecting among them, orienting and training new hires, and placing them where they can succeed. I take each stage in turn, comparing what Larkspur did with what the stage requires.

Job Analysis

Larkspur's description omits what drives people away. The job starts at 6:00 a.m., when photographers load about 55 pounds of lights, stands and backdrops into a van. They set up in a gym or library in 30 minutes, then photograph 400 to 700 students at a pace of about one every 25 seconds, many of them kindergartners who will not sit still. The description says "flexible schedule," but picture days cannot move. A proper job analysis would have identified the physical load, the fixed early hours, the pace and the need to work with young children as core requirements.

Recruitment

Larkspur posted the job on a general job board and on a photography forum. The photography forum drew candidates who love photography and expected creative work. The job is closer to a production line with a camera. Recruiting from people who have worked with children in high-volume settings, such as summer camp staff, school aides and youth sports coaches, might have drawn candidates better prepared for the pace.

Selection

Selection relied on a portfolio review and one unstructured interview. Portfolios show creative skill, which the job barely uses. Schmidt and Hunter (1998) brought together 85 years of hiring research and concluded that a standard set of questions asked of every candidate, and a sample of the real work, forecast later performance far better than a free-form conversation does. A short work sample, photographing twenty volunteers in thirty minutes with the company's standard setup, would test the actual job.

Orientation and Training

New photographers received one afternoon of training on the lighting setup and then shadowed an experienced photographer for one picture day before shooting alone. Nobody showed them how to keep a line of kindergartners moving, how to handle a child who cries, or how to pack the van in the order it unloads. Bauer et al. (2007) found in a meta-analysis that newcomers adjust better when socialization helps them understand their role and feel confident in it, and that this adjustment is linked to lower turnover intentions.

Placement

The most damaging decision came last. Larkspur assigned most new photographers to elementary schools, because those are the most numerous, and gave the high school senior and sports sessions to experienced staff. New hires therefore started with the hardest subjects, the youngest children, on their first days.

The schedule made it worse. Elementary schools are photographed first in the season, because their families order early, so the first two weeks of a new photographer's job were almost entirely kindergarten through fifth grade. A veteran photographer told me that a kindergarten line is the hardest skill in the job and that she spent most of her first season learning it. Larkspur asked new hires to learn it in their first week, alone, at the pace of one child every 25 seconds. Seven of the nine departures happened in exactly that window.

Synthesis

Ranking the failures by how much of the turnover each plausibly explains, the job analysis and the recruitment message come first, because they let people accept a job they did not understand. Exit comments named early starts, equipment and pace, all things the posting did not mention. Placement comes second, because it exposed new hires to the hardest work first. Selection and training matter but would not have prevented people from leaving a job they never expected. Premack and Wanous (1985), combining the early experiments on previews that show the job honestly, reported lower turnover among people who saw them, partly because candidates who would not fit chose not to join.

It is worth asking what the fifteen photographers who stayed had in common, since they show what the process should look for. According to the field supervisors, eleven of the fifteen had worked with groups of children before, as camp counselors, coaches, teachers' aides or parents who volunteered in classrooms. Only six had professional photography experience. The current process screens heavily for the second trait and not at all for the first, which is close to the opposite of what the job rewards.

That observation also changes what the company should look for in an interview. Questions about favorite lenses or editing software tell the interviewer little. Questions about the last time a candidate kept a group of restless children on task, or worked a physically demanding early shift, go straight to the reasons people left.

Seven of the nine who left quit over things the job posting never told them.

Recommendations

First, rewrite the job description and posting to state the 6:00 a.m. starts, the 55 pounds of equipment, the pace and the work with young children, and add a short video of a picture day as a realistic preview. Second, recruit from camp staff, school aides and youth coaches as well as photographers. Third, replace the portfolio review with a thirty-minute work sample and a structured interview. Fourth, extend shadowing to three picture days, including one elementary school, and teach handling young children explicitly. Fifth, start new photographers at middle schools before moving them to elementary schools. The measure is simple: the number of seasonal photographers who leave before October 1.

These changes cost little. Rewriting the posting and filming a short preview take a few days of staff time. The work sample uses equipment the company already owns. Extending shadowing from one day to three costs about two extra paid days per new hire, roughly [$400] each, which is small against the cost of recruiting and training a replacement in September, when the season is already underway and every lost photographer day becomes overtime for someone else.

References

Bauer, T. N., Bodner, T., Erdogan, B., Truxillo, D. M., & Tucker, J. S. (2007). Newcomer adjustment during organizational socialization: A meta-analytic review of antecedents, outcomes, and methods. Journal of Applied Psychology, 92(3), 707-721. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.92.3.707

Premack, S. L., & Wanous, J. P. (1985). A meta-analysis of realistic job preview experiments. Journal of Applied Psychology, 70(4), 706-719. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.70.4.706

Robbins, S. P., & Coulter, M. (2021). Management (15th ed.). Pearson.

Schmidt, F. L., & Hunter, J. E. (1998). The validity and utility of selection methods in personnel psychology: Practical and theoretical implications of 85 years of research findings. Psychological Bulletin, 124(2), 262-274. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.124.2.262