MBAX 6441 Week 4 Hard-to-Fill Vacancy Case Example

Five Months Without a CT Engineer in Charlotte: Pricing the Vacancy, Testing Why It Stays Open and Choosing a Channel and Selection Method That Predict Performance

Student Name

Walden University

MBAX 6441: Human Resources Management and Strategic Planning

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Five Months Without a CT Engineer in Charlotte: Pricing the Vacancy, Testing Why It Stays Open and Choosing a Channel and Selection Method That Predict Performance

The Situation, Priced

Meridian, the invented clinical equipment servicer this term follows, has had an imaging service engineer position open in its Charlotte region for five months. The engineer would cover CT scanners at nine hospitals under uptime contracts. While the seat is empty, two things happen. When a scanner fails and Meridian's other Charlotte engineer is busy, Meridian calls the manufacturer's own field engineer, billed at time-and-materials rates, and pays the hospital uptime credits when repairs run past the guaranteed window. Over the past five months those costs averaged about $9,800 a month in manufacturer charges and $1,600 in uptime credits, or roughly $11,400 a month, about $57,000 so far. The remaining engineer has also worked about 22 hours of overtime a month, which is costing retention risk as well as pay. All figures are illustrative. The role sits in what Lepak and Snell (1999) would call the core of the workforce, scarce and central to the strategy, which is why a long vacancy matters more here than in other families.

Causes Tested, Not Chosen

Three explanations are commonly offered for a hard-to-fill technical role: too few applicants, offers turned down, or candidates lost during the process. Each points to a different fix, so the case tests them against Meridian's applicant tracking records for the requisition.

Applicant volume is low but not the binding problem: six qualified candidates reached the interview, and three received offers. All three declined. Exit notes from the recruiter record the reasons: two accepted manufacturer offers that paid between $9,000 and $14,000 more in base salary, and one cited the on-call schedule. The evidence points to pay and, secondarily, to the on-call burden, not to sourcing or process. A case that blamed the job board would have guessed.

Table 1

Recruiting Funnel for the Charlotte Imaging Engineer Requisition, Five Months

Composite organization; figures illustrative, from the requisition's tracking record.

Channels With Yields and Prices

The case compares four channels on cost per hire, time to fill and a quality signal drawn from Meridian's own hiring history.

Because the cause is pay rather than sourcing, a more expensive channel alone would not solve the problem: a recruiter would deliver candidates who also receive manufacturer offers. The recommendation combines a channel change with a pay change. Raise the offer for this role to the 75th percentile of the imaging engineer market, as the course's earlier pay argument proposed, and recruit through employee referrals first, since referral hires at Meridian have stayed longest, with a specialized recruiter as backup after 45 days.

The secondary cause, the on-call schedule, deserves its own fix. Charlotte's two engineers now split every night and weekend between them, one week in two. Pairing Charlotte with the Greenville engineers in a shared rotation would cut that to one week in four, at the cost of longer drive times on some calls, and a modest on-call stipend would recognize the burden that remains. Candidates comparing offers notice these terms as much as base pay.

Table 2

Recruiting Channels for Imaging Engineers, Illustrative

Composite organization; costs include advertising, fees and interview time.

Criteria That Predict Performance

The current process relies on an unstructured interview with the regional manager. Schmidt and Hunter (1998), pooling 85 years of selection research, concluded that trying the actual work, and answering the same planned questions as every other applicant, tells an employer far more about future performance than an open-ended chat. The case recommends two changes: a two-hour work sample in which candidates diagnose a fault on a decommissioned CT gantry at the Charlotte depot, scored on a checklist by two senior engineers; and a scripted interview, identical for each candidate, focused on past handling of urgent repairs and customer conflict. Both add little cost and give the company better evidence when it is paying above market.

Decision and Measurement

Approve a revised offer range for the Charlotte imaging engineer at the 75th percentile, a referral bonus of $5,000 and the work sample and structured interview. Measure success by offer acceptance on the next three offers, time to fill under 90 days and the new engineer's first-time fix rate at six months compared with the regional average. Breaugh (2008) notes that recruitment decisions improve when organizations track results by source, so Meridian should record the channel and outcome for every hire from now on.

References

Breaugh, J. A. (2008). Employee recruitment: Current knowledge and important areas for future research. Human Resource Management Review, 18(3), 103-118. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.hrmr.2008.07.003

Lepak, D. P., & Snell, S. A. (1999). The human resource architecture: Toward a theory of human capital allocation and development. Academy of Management Review, 24(1), 31-48. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.1999.1580439

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