You are the Human Resources Leadership Team of a consumer electronics manufacturing firm. It is your job to gain a competitive advantage through the people in your organization. You will start with three employees, and you will need to add to this roster as your firm succeeds and grows.

Throughout the simulation, you will:

Most importantly, you are competing with other firms for the same talent pool. Every decision you make has an impact on something, ranging from candidate's likelihood of accepting job offers to employees choosing to continue to work for your company. You must develop a coherent people strategy for how your firm will succeed.

Talent Management

Talent Management is about recruiting and selecting the right people for the job. Advertising positions or offering employee referral bonuses will impact your ability to recruit qualified applicants for positions. In addition, there are four selection assessments you can invest in to narrow your candidate pool. You can choose an unstructured or structured interview, an assessment center, an intelligence test, or a personality test. Each test reveals different information about candidates (refer to the Decision Sheet at the end of this manual), and, in general, more expensive selection tests reveal more information about candidates.

Performance Management

You can choose to assess your current employees' satisfaction and/or performance regularly. If you choose not to invest in one or both for a given period, you will not have access to your current employees' performance and/or satisfaction in the subsequent period. This may make evaluation and staffing decisions difficult.

Total Rewards

You can choose to invest in three different compensation strategies: mean pay level, merit bonuses, and employee benefits. Each strategy has different effects on employees in the firm. Within each strategy, you can choose from: a lead-the-market strategy (i.e. spend from your allocated funds to improve compensation), a meet-the-market strategy (i.e. spend nothing from your funds), or a lag-the-market-strategy (i.e. take money out of the compensation pool, which you can then invest in other HR programs).

Employee Development

There are three development strategies: 1) an annual performance feedback meeting, 2) formal skills training, and 3) leadership development training. The latter two are more expensive, but have a bigger impact on employee's skill growth. As their KSA's grow, your employees will become more effective in their jobs.

In any period, you can choose to terminate an employee or move an employee to a different role. Moving an employee to a different role can be very effective if it would improve his or her person-job fit. In order to move someone to a new role, that role must first be vacated either through open positions (as the company grows), turnover or termination.

When you have an open position, the lack of productivity will negatively impact your firm for that period. However, carefully filling open positions can result in greater long-term rewards for your company as your human capital grows.

In a given period you rank up to 6 individuals for an open job category. If there are 3 openings for a specific title, the simulation will attempt to hire 3 of your top 6. Remember that you are competing with other players for the same employees, so when employees get multiple offers they can choose based on their perceptions of your company.

There are 10 KSA's you can learn about through your selection procedures. Consider using O*NET to identify which KSA's will be most important for each job title. Through selection you can also learn the candidates' intelligence (GMA), and personality, which can be useful in identifying the best applicants. Remember that person-organization fit will come into play in employees' job satisfaction. You don't want to hire someone with a strikingly different personality than your team if it means they will turn over shortly after you hire them. Any of this information will be revealed if you invest in selection tests that reveal that attribute, otherwise you'll see a blank if you choose not to invest in that predictor.

Need more detail? See an example student input here.