Accountco is a small accountancy firm based in the south of England. There are 4 partners and 25 staff, 5 of whom are employed in secretarial and support roles. The firm is over 50 years old and has a solid reputation in the local area. The firm does not have a specialist personnel department. There is a partner designated to supervise the contractors who are employed by the firm to manage pensions and payroll issues, but there is little or no coordination of activities in other areas.
Accountco is having problems both in recruiting new graduates to work for the company and in retaining its existing staff, when much better terms and conditions of employment are being offered by large London-based firms. In other words, the biggest problem for Accountco is in attracting a sufficiently large pool of applicants from which to select and the partners are now thinking carefully about what is it that will attract new recruits to apply to the firm.
Although inevitably some rules have developed over the years, there is still a remarkable absence of rigid rules and practices.
Work continues to be organised largely through informal systems of consultation within which Adam Smith as founder and senior partner and his brother John play key roles. This has helped to maintain the culture of a small family firm where personalities matter more than ‘plans’, ‘structures’ or ‘hierarchies’. There are no formal meetings, except a monthly partners’ meeting, where they share information about what is happening in relation to any large client accounts. Otherwise communication is informal and ad hoc. While there is the opportunity to experience a wide range of activities (if not a wide range of clients)
this again tends to happen on a very ad hoc basis without any formal planning or discussions.
The firm has been very good in supporting trainee accountants in terms of paying exam fees, but very little study leave has been offered.
Tom Steele, one of the newest partners, is a strong supporter of the need to professionalise, to tap into the university graduate recruitment fairs and gain access to the brighter students at some of the top management schools. Tom believes that the firm should be looking to extend its client base, develop new areas of expertise and generally enhance its reputation in the marketplace. He believes that it is imperative to develop a more positive profile in the trade press – magazines such as Accountancy Today – without which he believes it will be impossible to attract and retain individuals of sufficient dynamism to generate the enhanced reputation he feels is necessary.
Tom has also heard from some of his friends working in the United States of some of the more aggressive approaches to recruitment that are being adopted there. He is particularly attracted by the idea of recruiting online.
As one article he has read put it:

kwith so many firms competing for a limited number of skilled candidates, savvy small businesses are launching what amounts to guerrilla recruiting strategy, an approach that is defining the way small businesses capture talent. Employers are realizing that they must actively market and brand their companies to attract the most highly qualified talent – quickly and cost effectively. The solution of choice? Recruiting online where smaller firms can reach and ‘meet’ more candidates.............

Questions

You are asked to address the following questions in the light of Tom Steele’s concerns and the information in the background briefing:
1. What benefits are Accountco likely to see from having a more strategic approach to human resource planning? What particular problems are Accountco going to have in adopting a more strategic approach, given its size and the nature of the labour market in which it operates?
2. In terms of Hendry’s model of employment systems, how would Accountco currently be described? Is this an appropriate employment system to have in the circumstances?
3. What would your advice be in terms of the actual steps that Accountco could take in trying to attract a larger pool of applicants?
To what extent would this help to resolve problems with retention?
4. What sort of benchmarks would you use for assessing the ‘success’ or ‘failure’ of any new recruitment or resourcing strategy?