2. What would you do first if you were Jennifer? A main theme of this book is that human resource management activities like recruiting, selecting, training, and rewarding employees is not just the job of a central HR group but rather a job in which every manager must engage. Perhaps nowhere is this more apparent than in the typical small service business.

Here the owner/manager usually has no HR staff to rely on.

However, the success of his or her enterprise (not to mention his or her family s peace of mind) often depends largely on the effectiveness through which workers are recruited, hired, trained, evaluated, and rewarded. Therefore, to help illustrate and emphasize the front-line manager s HR role, throughout this book we will use a continuing case based on an actual small business in the southeastern United States. Each chapter s segment of the case will illustrate how the case s main player owner/manager Jennifer Carter confronts and solves personnel problems each day at work by applying the concepts and techniques of that particular chapter. Here is background information that you will need to answer questions that arise in subsequent chapters. (We also present a second, unrelated application case case incident in each chapter.)