Here are some key questions to be answered:
- Who has the decision-making responsibility for final selection? The manager alone, two levels of management, the manager with the concurrence of a personnel specialist?
- Does this decision-making responsibility vary with the organization level (or salary level) of the opening?
- How are candidate pools assembled? By the manager? By the personnel office? From inside the department, outside it, outside the company?
- Who is eliminated from consideration? People of certain age groups, employees with short tenure in current jobs, employees rated below certain levels, those with specified health problems, those in certain parts of the organization?
- Are some candidates given preference in consideration? Long-service employees, employees within the department where the opening occurs, those in specified training programs?
- If an employee is selected, does he have the choice of accepting or declining without sacrificing future consideration?
- If an employee is selected, does his present manager have the choice of permitting or refusing his acceptance?
- If an employee is denied permission to accept, what recourse or appeal does he have?
- Are the serious competitors for a position told of their status and of reasons for the final decision?
- Are the monetary rewards and other perquisites attached to a position fixed and stated, or are they negotiable at the time of offer and acceptance?
Simple Procedures in Use to Implement Policy
A policy is only as good as the procedures and tools available to implement it. Regardless of the policy decisions, the following are needed:
- Notice of actual or impending opening. This may be a form to be completed or a note or checklist of items to be included in the description of the responsibilities of the opening.
- Specifications for the opening. The most useful is a list of things the incumbent should have done in the past, the conditions under which he should have functioned successfully, and the kinds of experiences that are most likely to have prepared him for the opening.
- Up-to-date personnel data records. Some itemization is needed of current expressions of career interests and of the education, work experience, and extracurricular activities of all employees, assembled in a form that permits efficient search with elimination of unqualified individuals and identification of those to be considered. In large companies, this usually means some computerized sorting system. In smaller firms, a manual or mechanical sort is probably adequate.
- Evaluative tools. Once the candidate pool is assembled, evaluative tools are needed to expose the full talents of the individuals involved. These may consist of past performance appraisals, past accomplishments matched against plans, personal interview data, tests, checks with former managers who know the individual's work and methods, and similar sources of information.
- Data comparison. With the information about the leading contenders in hand, a systematic method of comparing their qualifications is needed. A current trend is to let several persons participate in this comparison in order to eliminate personal bias (to the extent this is possible).
- Notice of offer or rejection. This need only be a simple telephone call by the manager or a personnel specialist to communicate the decision and the reasons for it.
- Formal move procedure. Some clear-cut rules on how a man completes one job and moves to another are needed. It is desirable to state a maximum time limit for the change and to point out the man's responsibilities to his present manager and the latter's responsibilities to him.
All systems are subject to exceptions. But the promotion system of a firm is so subject to manipulation that it is especially important for its observance to be monitored or audited periodically. So important is it for employees to view the system as fair and its implementation honest that such audit reports should probably be made directly to the president or to the vice-president responsible for personnel.
The audit can be simple-a random sampling of several promotions at different levels in the company that notes how they were handled, how the individual was finally selected, how those rejected were handled, and so forth. A president can reinforce observance of policy by complimenting the manager who handles a matter well, while some serious discussion may be in order if corrective action seems necessary.
Appeal or Recourse
When a man is refused a job he feels qualified to handle or if he feels he was never considered at all, he inevitably has a negative reaction. This makes him more receptive to outside offers or spurs him to search for another job. Some of this reaction can be dissipated if the individual knows he can state his feelings without personal penalty and a quiet investigation can be made if warranted. Since, in some cases, the last person he is willing to talk to is his boss, the appeal probably must be to a third party, out-side his chain of command. A designated personnel specialist with access to top management is a logical person to seek in a large organization. An assigned member of the president's staff may be suitable in a small organization.
Business Information
Imparting business information is seldom considered an essential ingredient of career advancement. It should be. It may well be more important than training programs and career discussions. The individual in a firm who understands the business he is in, the strategy used, the market, and the competition or lack of it can do his own job more creatively and can contribute ideas upward that influence the work of his department. With such influence comes personal involvement, and his goals begin to shape themselves around the goals of the firm.
In the absence of such information and understanding, he must be guided by the direction and counsel of his manager to a far greater extent. This leaves him with fewer choices and possibly a lessened interest in the company.
To help impart business information in an interest-arousing fashion, such devices as summit meetings to plan important projects, meet key goals, or solve major problems broaden opportunities for involvement. Debates on issues where there are difficult choices of strategy to make and membership on task forces or study teams that can make recommendations on specified matters above and beyond the scope of the individual's own job lend further interest.
