Michael Jackson is the president and CEO of a small hotel corporation (Jackson Hotels, Inc.) which caters to high-end vacationers in resort communities. The company currently employs 2,144 staff members at its corporate headquarters in Palm Springs, CA and its other hotels in Scottsdale, AZ; Aspen, CO; Orlando, FL; Santa Fe, NM; Sea Island, GA; and Charleston, SC. Recently, the company underwent a strategic planning process. The plan envisions adding ten new locations and tripling its workforce over the next five years. The human resource challenge is to recruit experienced and high-quality managers for its corporate headquarters, recruit managers for new hotels, and manage existing and expansion hotels in a variety of managerial roles. 

Up to the present, Jackson has relied on his contacts in the hotel industry to recommend candidates for these positions. Some have been hired and some have not, and many of those hired have not performed as well as Jackson had hoped and expected. 

During an informal discussion with Carol Cross, one of his hotel managers, Cross suggested most of the larger hotel chains now recruit their managers and other professionals through the Internet. She suggested that Internet recruitment might enhance both the quantity and quality of the applicant pool. Jackson then asked his vice president of human resources, Shirley Gomez, to research online recruiting and make recommendations to him. She reported the following: Finding qualified and motivated employees was one of the top three business worries among small companies like his own. 

Almost all large companies and many small companies now provide online recruiting and some only accept online applications. Almost all applicants for professional and managerial positions now use the Internet. Another trend is the use of online prescreening tools to separate the qualified applicants from the unqualified. Some hotel chains are now tapping into skilled foreign labor through the Internet. There are more than 2,500 Web sites that contain job postings and among the most prominent generic Web sites are: http://www.monster.com http://www.careerpaths.com http://www.careerbuilder.com http://www.careermosaic.com http://www.hotjobs.com http://www.flipdog.com http://www.jobtrak.com http://www.spherion.com.

The latest generation of Web tools includes online job fairs in which companies can meet candidates in a virtual environment and can chat with them online. All approaches to online recruitment and selection seem to be cost effective relative to alternatives. The three main approaches to Internet recruiting are job boards (like the Web sites above), professional/career Web sites, which focus on particular occupations and professions, and employer Web sites. Gomez has asked your professor of Human Resources Management (Dr. Martin Cannon) to help her formulate recommendations for Jackson. Dr. Cannon has asked your class to meet in small groups of two to four students each to address her questions and report to the class. 

These questions are outlined below. 

1. What are the advantages and disadvantages of Internet recruitment and selection for a small, but expanding company like Jackson Hotels? How would you minimize the disadvantages? 

2. Which of the above three approaches to online recruiting and selection (if any) makes the most sense in this case and why? 

3. What prescreening hurdles would you impose in your Internet recruitment in order to pre-qualify a small number of truly qualified applicants? Why? 

4. Based on your knowledge of other companies’ Web sites, what information should Jackson Hotels provide to job applicants and what steps should follow Internet recruitment to identify the most qualified applicants?