Recruiting or Retaining

CASE: WHICH IS MORE IMPORTANT a€“ RECRUITING OR RETAINING? G. K Electronics Ltd. , is a pioneering and internationally reputed firm in the Electronics industry. It is one of the largest firms in the country. It attracted employees from internationally reputed institutes and industries by offering high salaries, perks etc. It has advertised for the position of an Electronics Engineer recently. Nearly 150 candidates working in various electronics firms applied for the job. Mr.

Sashidhar, an Electronics Engineering Graduate from IIT with 5 years working experience in a small electronics firm was selected from among the 130 candidates who took tests and interview. The interview board recommended an enhancement in his salary by Rs. 500 per month more than his present salary at his request. Mr. Sashidhar was very happy to achieve this and he was congratulated by a number of people including his previous employer for his brilliant interview performance and good luck. Mr. Sashidhar joined G. K. Electronics Ltd. on 21st January, 1996 with a great enthusiasm. He also found his job to be quite comfortable and challenging one and he felt it was highly prestigious to work with this company during the formative years of his career. He found his superiors as well as subordinates to be friendly and cooperative. But this climate did not live long. After one year of his service, he slowly learnt about a number of unpleasant stories about the company, management, the superior-subordinate relations, rate of employee turnover, especially at higher level.

But he decided to stay on as he promised several things to the management in the interview. He wanted to please and change the attitude of management through diligent performance, firm commitment and dedication. He started maximizing his contributions and management got the impression that Mr. Sashidhar has settled down and will remain in the company. After sometime, the superiors started riding over Mr. Sashidhar. He was overloaded with multifarious jobs. His freedom in deciding and executing was cut down to size.

He was ill-treated on a number of occasions before his subordinates. His colleagues also started assigning their responsibilities to Mr. Sashidhar. Consequently there were imbalances in his family life, social life and organization life. But he seemed to be calm and contented. Management felt that Mr. Sashidhar had the potential to hear with many more organization responsibilities. It was quite surprising to the General Manager to see the resignation letter of Mr. Sashidhar along with a check equivalent to a montha€™s salary one fine morning on 18th January, 1998.

The General Manager failed to convince Mr. Sashidhar to withdraw his resignation. The General Manager relieved him on 25th January, 1998. The General Manager wanted to appoint a committee to go into the matter immediately, but dropped the idea later. The inference from the above is very clear. The management had no strategy of retaining capable employees by giving them proper treatment and responsibilities. They also have not laid out any HR policy of defining area of responsibility for executives or staff.

It appears any body in the firm can pass any work to their colleagues and even management is also not bothered about over loading a capable person willing to undertake challenging tasks with responsibility. If the above defects can be corrected by the management and senior managers they can retain capable managers or executives and the manpower turnover may come down and the companya€™s reputation with regards to human resources will go up. The firm can attract more and more capable personnel.