Many organizations prefer to use their resources in marketing or designing instead of staffing. In my view, marketing or designing is more ‘visible’ compared with staffing. Marketing is very easy to be reflected by sales and profit. Good marketing can easily bring a huge increase in sales and boost up profit. That is similar to product design. When an organization pushes out a new product with stunning design, that can make their product be outstanding compared with their competitors. That will bring more profit too. However, employees are not easy to be evaluated in a short term. It will take time to let co-workers and leaders know the new employee. Also, there are many factors inflecting the efficiency of an employee. For example, a well-known programmer joining a new organization, but he doesn’t like his team, that will make his ability decrease a lot. So, compared with employee selection, marketing or product design is an easier way to get pay back and with a relatively lower failure rate.
When organizations decide to select a few aspects of new employees for their business, the biggest weakness is that it will bring the organization with lower diversity. Diversity is very important in an organization, people with different backgrounds, cultures, habits will bring more value for the organization. However, if the organization is picky in few required aspects, that will let them have lower diversity. That will bring a benefit for them at the same time. Employees are easier to manage and easier to cooperate with each other, because they have similar characteristics. For example, the organization only hires people who are willing to work in the morning. The whole team will be an early bird team, and no one will complain about having a meeting in the morning.
Hi Jaiqi! Your post was very insightful, and you provided a great counterargument. One thing that really stood out to me that I had not considered was both the external visuality of staffing versus marketing/product design and how putting a focus on marketing/product design may have a better payback and lower failure rate. I think these are great examples as to why some company leaders may choose to focus more resources on other aspects of the company, rather than staffing.
I also like how you mentioned how this can lead to a lack of diversity, and while this can have some pros, I think there are more consequences in the long run. We have seen that a diverse workplace can be essential to a company’s success, as different people have different ideas and ways of doing things.