Organizations are faced with an incredible challenge when dividing resources throughout the firm. However, employees are the fundamental building blocks of a successful company. In the beginning, priorities such as marketing or product development can be more essential than the recruitment and selection process. If consumers don’t know the product exists or, worse, know it exists with errors that need to be corrected, the firm won’t be successful. There are different types of problems; apparent problems, such as getting the word out about a new product through advertising, and complex problems, such as fostering an environment for healthy company culture through a great hiring and selection process. The apparent difficulties have quantitative solutions; they applied x amount of dollars to marketing and received an influx in sales of y. Complex problems have qualitative variables. For example, Kathy was recruited to improve the hiring program, she did so, and sales possibly could be up from that. The employee turnover rate is down, things that can be challenging to put a dollar sign on.

The potential strengths and weaknesses when a firm does not allocate enough resources to recruitment and selection vary. The disadvantages are a high turnover rate (i.e., lost hiring and training expenses), unhappy customers, and the potential of one lousy apple impacting all the other good apples. The strengths are a great product with a strong supply chain supporting it, good advertising for the firm, and advanced software. Overall none of these strengths outweigh the weaknesses if employees aren’t backing them. In the lecture, it was mentioned that highly skilled or example employees are not an infinite resource. If an organization has the best product or service on the market and horrible customer service, it will not exist for long.