abhishreshthaa
Abhijeet S
Discovery Communications, Inc. (DCI) (NASDAQ: DISCA, NASDAQ: DISCB, NASDAQ: DISCK) is an American global media and entertainment company. The company started as a single channel in 1985, The Discovery Channel. Today, DCI has global operations offering 28 network entertainment brands on more than 100 channels in more than 180 countries in 39 languages for over 1.5 billion subscribers around the globe.[1] Discovery Communications is based in Silver Spring, Maryland. The company's slogan is: "The number-one nonfiction media company."[2]
DCI both produces original programming and acquires content from producers worldwide. This non-fiction programming is offered through DCI's 28 network entertainment brands, including Discovery Channel, Military Channel, TLC, Animal Planet, Discovery Health Channel and a family of digital channels. DCI also distributes BBC America and BBC World News to cable and satellite operators in the United States.
The central tenet of performance management is the word performance which is defined as accomplishment of something or working effectiveness. Performance, on the one hand, is the act of carrying out or accomplishing something such as a task or action while, on the other, it is also the way in which somebody does a job as judged by its effectiveness. Within an organisation, performance is realised as three levels namely organisation, process and individual, and the interrelationships among these levels serve as the vantage points of an organisation. Acquiring economies of scope and scale is directly correlates acquiring competitive advantage. For multinational enterprises (MNEs) seeking to acquire cost and location advantages, expatriation is of high importance.
RECRUITMENT AND SELECTION
Effective recruiting can be a powerful strategic weapon. Developing innovative sources to find the best people is just as important as the selection process. The challenge is not only hiring the right people, but to find them before the competitor. is known for its non-traditional recruiting methods. To attract the highest caliber people, recruiting team targets what they call passive job seekers – people who are happy and successful where they are – because the most sought-after employees are not very accessible. sources revealed that the company had a policy of attracting the ‘top 10-15%’ people in the networking industry. It believed that if it could get the best people in the industry and retain them, it would remain the industry leader. According to vision statement, “Attracting, growing and retaining great talent is critical to sustaining competitive advantage.” Thus effective recruitment was used as a powerful strategic weapon by the company. As Barbara Beck, vice president for human resources says they ‘usually are not cruising through the “want ads”.
For the past several years, has averaged over 1,000 new hires every three months, an achievement by any standard, since Silicon Valley is one of the tightest job markets in the US. The recruiting team at first identified the kind of people they needed to hire, their ideal recruitment targets. They then held focus groups with the ideal recruitment targets, such as senior engineers and marketing professionals from competitors. Through these focus groups, the recruiting team found out where these people spent their time and how they hunted jobs. The team then innovated a hiring process that reached these potential applicants through a variety of routes not usually used in recruiting, such as infiltrating art fairs and microbrewery festivals and other places they frequented. Silicon Valley’s annual home and garden show has been a particularly fruitful venue. The first-time homebuyers that the event attracts also tend to be young achievers at successful high-technology companies. recruiters work the crowd, collecting business cards from prospects, and speaking with them informally about their careers.
continues to place newspaper help-wanted advertisements, but rather than listing specific job openings, the advertisements feature its internet address and an invitation to apply. Beck notes that is a high-technology company and ‘if you don’t leverage the technology, you won’t be able to leverage HR’s capabilities’. On the internet, it can post hundreds of job openings in expensively and lots of information about each one. The website has a built-in monitor that measures important aspects of its recruiting programmes, such as the number of visits to its site. Since most prospects visit the website from their workplaces, the company can even tell where they work.
Besides this, Beck also notes, that the top 10% of the highest-performing employees are not typically found in the first round of layoffs from other companies. Moreover, the top performers are not likely to be usually cruising through the ‘want ads’. Therefore, the strategy for recruiting the high performers relies heavily on the internet.
E-recruiting at
The company’s website (http://www..com/jobs) has become a turbo-charged recruiting tool. An individual looking for a job at can search by keyword to match one’s skills with the job openings. One can also file a resume or create one online using resume builder. By monitoring the website, the recruitment team realized that their jobs page recorded over 500,000 hits per month, with the heaviest load occurring between 10 am and 2 pm. This meant that people were looking for jobs on company time. To help facilitate this practice, is developing software to make life easy for stealthy job-seekers. It will let users click on pull-down menus and profile themselves in 10 minutes. If the boss walks by, users can hit a button that activates a screen disguise, changing it to ‘Gift List for Boss and Workmates’ or ‘Seven Successful Habits of a Great Employee’. The website has caused 30-50% of all resumes to be submitted electronically and routed automatically into a database that can be accessed immediately.
The website actively targets passive job seekers by making it fun and easy to match personal skills and interests to job openings. Through focus groups, sought to learn how happily employed people could be enticed to interview for a job. The firm goes beyond technology. Focus group results showed that referrals from friends were a powerful factor in the job search process. The response ‘I’d do it if a friend told me he had a better opportunity at than I have at my current employer’ caused than I have at my current employer’ caused to launch an initiative-the ‘friends’ programme-to help prospects make a friend at who could describe what it was like to work there. The Friends programme on website involves potential recruits by allowing them to pair up with a volunteer ‘friend’ from within the company. establishes connection with a potential employee on their website. Their ‘Make Friends @ ’ button begins the process of establishing an ‘e-mail pal’. The objective is to connect potential recruits to real people in the company. The recruits are then swept into the recruiting pipeline. employees are matched with people who have approached the company as prospects and who have approached the company as prospects and who have similar backgrounds and skills. They then call these prospects, or ‘visitors’ as they are called at , to tell them in their own words about life at the company. The new friend teaches the visitor about , introduces the visitor to the right people, and leads the visitor through the hiring process.
It works like this. A designer of printed circuit boards clicked on the ‘Make Friends @ ’ button at the website. She received a call from a printed circuit board designer at , the volunteer friend, who talked about life at . The volunteer referred her to his boss and a few days later she visited . After five interviews, she accepted a job, even though she had been with her earlier firm 11 years and was not really looking to leave. Having a ‘friend’ made the difference. When a recruit is invited to visit the company, the volunteer friend/host may pick the recruit up at the airport, show them around the area, escort them through the interview day, and generally be the ‘at-ease-link’ in the recruitment process. According to Fortune, 1,000 employees have volunteered for the programme, enticed by a generous referral fee and a lottery ticket for a free trip to Hawaii for each reference hired. Referees are eligible for other prizes such as stainless steel commuter mugs and athletic bags. Though the programme is advertised only in local movie theatres, receives 100-150 requests each week from applicants wishing to be introduced to a friend at . This source provides about a third of new hires.
It is believed that about 60% of the people who join do so because they have a friend there. Every time a referral is hired, the employee gets $500-2,000. Referral rates at are twice the industry norm. uses internal communication tools such as newsletters and the intranet to update employees about the referral programme. The real power of website is not that it helps active job seekers move more quickly; it is that the website sells the company to people who are happy and satisfied in their current jobs and have never thought about working at . The firm targets the passive job-seeker.
is also making their managers’ time-consuming recruiting process easier by hiring in-house headhunters. Since hiring a new salesperson six months earlier can mean several million dollars in incremental revenue, expediting the hiring process far outweighs the expense of the additional staff. Based on performance reviews conducted three months after employees start work, and a continued low turnover rate, the networking giant believes its talent pool remains undiluted. Chambers says, ‘Our philosophy is very simple-if you get the best people in the industry to fit into your culture and you motivate them properly, then you are going to be an industry leader’.
•
•
Staff turnover/retention
Staff “headroom” – proportion of filled positions to total positions; proportion of positions filled by
long-term staff versus temporary staff and consultants
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Staff qualifications and experience
Numbers and types of applicants for advertised vacancies
Staff diversity
Staff satisfaction
Staff performance ratings
Professional development hours achieved
Overtime and (where Centers implement time tracking systems) unbilled time
Health and safety statistics
DCI both produces original programming and acquires content from producers worldwide. This non-fiction programming is offered through DCI's 28 network entertainment brands, including Discovery Channel, Military Channel, TLC, Animal Planet, Discovery Health Channel and a family of digital channels. DCI also distributes BBC America and BBC World News to cable and satellite operators in the United States.
The central tenet of performance management is the word performance which is defined as accomplishment of something or working effectiveness. Performance, on the one hand, is the act of carrying out or accomplishing something such as a task or action while, on the other, it is also the way in which somebody does a job as judged by its effectiveness. Within an organisation, performance is realised as three levels namely organisation, process and individual, and the interrelationships among these levels serve as the vantage points of an organisation. Acquiring economies of scope and scale is directly correlates acquiring competitive advantage. For multinational enterprises (MNEs) seeking to acquire cost and location advantages, expatriation is of high importance.
RECRUITMENT AND SELECTION
Effective recruiting can be a powerful strategic weapon. Developing innovative sources to find the best people is just as important as the selection process. The challenge is not only hiring the right people, but to find them before the competitor. is known for its non-traditional recruiting methods. To attract the highest caliber people, recruiting team targets what they call passive job seekers – people who are happy and successful where they are – because the most sought-after employees are not very accessible. sources revealed that the company had a policy of attracting the ‘top 10-15%’ people in the networking industry. It believed that if it could get the best people in the industry and retain them, it would remain the industry leader. According to vision statement, “Attracting, growing and retaining great talent is critical to sustaining competitive advantage.” Thus effective recruitment was used as a powerful strategic weapon by the company. As Barbara Beck, vice president for human resources says they ‘usually are not cruising through the “want ads”.
For the past several years, has averaged over 1,000 new hires every three months, an achievement by any standard, since Silicon Valley is one of the tightest job markets in the US. The recruiting team at first identified the kind of people they needed to hire, their ideal recruitment targets. They then held focus groups with the ideal recruitment targets, such as senior engineers and marketing professionals from competitors. Through these focus groups, the recruiting team found out where these people spent their time and how they hunted jobs. The team then innovated a hiring process that reached these potential applicants through a variety of routes not usually used in recruiting, such as infiltrating art fairs and microbrewery festivals and other places they frequented. Silicon Valley’s annual home and garden show has been a particularly fruitful venue. The first-time homebuyers that the event attracts also tend to be young achievers at successful high-technology companies. recruiters work the crowd, collecting business cards from prospects, and speaking with them informally about their careers.
continues to place newspaper help-wanted advertisements, but rather than listing specific job openings, the advertisements feature its internet address and an invitation to apply. Beck notes that is a high-technology company and ‘if you don’t leverage the technology, you won’t be able to leverage HR’s capabilities’. On the internet, it can post hundreds of job openings in expensively and lots of information about each one. The website has a built-in monitor that measures important aspects of its recruiting programmes, such as the number of visits to its site. Since most prospects visit the website from their workplaces, the company can even tell where they work.
Besides this, Beck also notes, that the top 10% of the highest-performing employees are not typically found in the first round of layoffs from other companies. Moreover, the top performers are not likely to be usually cruising through the ‘want ads’. Therefore, the strategy for recruiting the high performers relies heavily on the internet.
E-recruiting at
The company’s website (http://www..com/jobs) has become a turbo-charged recruiting tool. An individual looking for a job at can search by keyword to match one’s skills with the job openings. One can also file a resume or create one online using resume builder. By monitoring the website, the recruitment team realized that their jobs page recorded over 500,000 hits per month, with the heaviest load occurring between 10 am and 2 pm. This meant that people were looking for jobs on company time. To help facilitate this practice, is developing software to make life easy for stealthy job-seekers. It will let users click on pull-down menus and profile themselves in 10 minutes. If the boss walks by, users can hit a button that activates a screen disguise, changing it to ‘Gift List for Boss and Workmates’ or ‘Seven Successful Habits of a Great Employee’. The website has caused 30-50% of all resumes to be submitted electronically and routed automatically into a database that can be accessed immediately.
The website actively targets passive job seekers by making it fun and easy to match personal skills and interests to job openings. Through focus groups, sought to learn how happily employed people could be enticed to interview for a job. The firm goes beyond technology. Focus group results showed that referrals from friends were a powerful factor in the job search process. The response ‘I’d do it if a friend told me he had a better opportunity at than I have at my current employer’ caused than I have at my current employer’ caused to launch an initiative-the ‘friends’ programme-to help prospects make a friend at who could describe what it was like to work there. The Friends programme on website involves potential recruits by allowing them to pair up with a volunteer ‘friend’ from within the company. establishes connection with a potential employee on their website. Their ‘Make Friends @ ’ button begins the process of establishing an ‘e-mail pal’. The objective is to connect potential recruits to real people in the company. The recruits are then swept into the recruiting pipeline. employees are matched with people who have approached the company as prospects and who have approached the company as prospects and who have similar backgrounds and skills. They then call these prospects, or ‘visitors’ as they are called at , to tell them in their own words about life at the company. The new friend teaches the visitor about , introduces the visitor to the right people, and leads the visitor through the hiring process.
It works like this. A designer of printed circuit boards clicked on the ‘Make Friends @ ’ button at the website. She received a call from a printed circuit board designer at , the volunteer friend, who talked about life at . The volunteer referred her to his boss and a few days later she visited . After five interviews, she accepted a job, even though she had been with her earlier firm 11 years and was not really looking to leave. Having a ‘friend’ made the difference. When a recruit is invited to visit the company, the volunteer friend/host may pick the recruit up at the airport, show them around the area, escort them through the interview day, and generally be the ‘at-ease-link’ in the recruitment process. According to Fortune, 1,000 employees have volunteered for the programme, enticed by a generous referral fee and a lottery ticket for a free trip to Hawaii for each reference hired. Referees are eligible for other prizes such as stainless steel commuter mugs and athletic bags. Though the programme is advertised only in local movie theatres, receives 100-150 requests each week from applicants wishing to be introduced to a friend at . This source provides about a third of new hires.
It is believed that about 60% of the people who join do so because they have a friend there. Every time a referral is hired, the employee gets $500-2,000. Referral rates at are twice the industry norm. uses internal communication tools such as newsletters and the intranet to update employees about the referral programme. The real power of website is not that it helps active job seekers move more quickly; it is that the website sells the company to people who are happy and satisfied in their current jobs and have never thought about working at . The firm targets the passive job-seeker.
is also making their managers’ time-consuming recruiting process easier by hiring in-house headhunters. Since hiring a new salesperson six months earlier can mean several million dollars in incremental revenue, expediting the hiring process far outweighs the expense of the additional staff. Based on performance reviews conducted three months after employees start work, and a continued low turnover rate, the networking giant believes its talent pool remains undiluted. Chambers says, ‘Our philosophy is very simple-if you get the best people in the industry to fit into your culture and you motivate them properly, then you are going to be an industry leader’.
•
•
Staff turnover/retention
Staff “headroom” – proportion of filled positions to total positions; proportion of positions filled by
long-term staff versus temporary staff and consultants
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Staff qualifications and experience
Numbers and types of applicants for advertised vacancies
Staff diversity
Staff satisfaction
Staff performance ratings
Professional development hours achieved
Overtime and (where Centers implement time tracking systems) unbilled time
Health and safety statistics
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