DDBA 4990 Week 4 Staffing Analysis Example

What an Empty Dispatch Desk Costs: A Staffing Analysis for a Fourteen-Technician Plumbing and Drain Firm, Defining the Dispatcher Role by Its Work, Pricing a Vacancy and a Poor Hire, and Choosing a Selection Method

Student Name

Walden University

DDBA 4990: Business Essentials

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

What an Empty Dispatch Desk Costs: A Staffing Analysis for a Fourteen-Technician Plumbing and Drain Firm, Defining the Dispatcher Role by Its Work, Pricing a Vacancy and a Poor Hire, and Choosing a Selection Method

The Role, Defined by Its Work

Riverbend Plumbing & Drain, a composite firm in the Omaha area, sends fourteen service technicians to homes and small businesses six days a week. One dispatcher sits between the phone and the trucks. When the role is empty, the owner covers it, badly and at the cost of selling and estimating. The firm has lost two dispatchers in eighteen months, and the job posting it used both times asked for "a positive, energetic team player with great people skills." That describes a hope, not a job. Based on two weeks of call logs and the scheduling system's records, the work breaks down as follows:

The role is mostly judgment under time pressure and accurate record keeping. Warmth helps, but a dispatcher who is friendly and slow to re-route a technician costs the firm more than one who is brisk and accurate.

Table 1

Dispatcher Tasks by Share of Shift

Shares estimated from call logs and system time stamps over two weeks in September.

What a Vacancy Costs

When the desk is empty, the owner covers it. The cost has four parts. Recruiting costs include job board fees of about $600 per search. Supervisor time is the owner's, about 30 hours a week of dispatching, which displaces estimating work on larger jobs. Overtime appears because technicians wait between jobs that are poorly sequenced, extending the day. And jobs are lost because calls go unanswered or are booked too late.

The figures are estimates, and the largest, lost jobs, depends on how many missed calls become jobs. But the order of magnitude is clear: each failed hire or long vacancy costs the firm roughly what it pays a dispatcher for six months, about $21,000 at the current wage.

Table 2

Estimated Cost of a Six-Week Vacancy and of a Poor Hire Who Leaves Within Six Months

Each figure is an estimate built from the firm's own records; the basis column states the source.

Choosing a Selection Method

Riverbend has hired dispatchers by unstructured conversation with the owner. Research on selection gives a reason to change. Schmidt and Hunter (1998), summarizing decades of studies, ranked work samples and structured interviews well ahead of free-form conversation as predictors of how hires later performed. Sackett et al. (2022) revisited those estimates, arguing that earlier corrections had overstated several methods' validity, but structured interviews remained among the stronger predictors in their revised figures. Campion et al. (1997) described what makes an interview structured: identical questions about the job for each applicant, put in a fixed order and scored against anchors written in advance.

I recommend two steps. First, a 30-minute work sample: the candidate takes six recorded calls of varying urgency and books them into a mock schedule with four technicians, then rebuilds the afternoon when one job runs two hours long. The sample tests the two tasks that fill 60 percent of the shift. Second, a structured interview of six questions about past situations, such as handling an angry customer whose technician was late, scored against anchors the owner and the senior technician write before interviews begin. The work sample is scored before the interview, so a good conversation cannot outweigh a poor schedule.

What the Method Costs and What It Does Not Promise

The method costs about four hours of the owner's and senior technician's time per finalist, plus one afternoon to build the work sample. Against a failed hire costing about $20,000, that is modest. It does not guarantee a good hire; validity coefficients describe averages across many hires, and a firm hiring one dispatcher every year or two will see only a few outcomes. It does give Riverbend a defensible reason for each choice and a record to learn from.

References

Campion, M. A., Palmer, D. K., & Campion, J. E. (1997). A review of structure in the selection interview. Personnel Psychology, 50(3), 655-702. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-6570.1997.tb00709.x

Sackett, P. R., Zhang, C., Berry, C. M., & Lievens, F. (2022). Revisiting meta-analytic estimates of validity in personnel selection: Addressing systematic overcorrection for restriction of range. Journal of Applied Psychology, 107(11), 2040-2068. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000994

Schmidt, F. L., & Hunter, J. E. (1998). The validity and utility of selection methods in personnel psychology: Practical and theoretical implications of 85 years of research findings. Psychological Bulletin, 124(2), 262-274. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.124.2.262