If you were Jennifer, what would be the first thing that you would do when joining the business? resource management activities, such as recruiting, selecting, training, and rewarding employees, are not simply the responsibility of the HR team, but rather activities in which every manager must engage. Per-haps nowhere is this more apparent than in the typi-cal small-sized service business. Generally, the owner of a small-sized business doesnt have a designated HR staff to rely on. The success of the enterprise is highly dependent on a small number of employees and the effectiveness through which they are recruited, hired, trained, evaluated, and rewarded. To help illustrate and emphasize the front-line managers HR role, we will use a continuing case throughout this book that is based on an actual small cleaning business, owned and operated by Jennifer Carter. Each chapter presents a segment of the case that will illustrate how Jennifer confronts and solves personnel problems each day at work by apply-ing the concepts and techniques of that particular chap-ter.

We will begin this continuing case approach by describing some background information that you will need to answer questions that arise in subsequent chap-ters.

(We also present a second, unrelated application case case incident in each chapter.)