Whirlpool Corporation Talent Management Essay (Critical Writing)

Introduction

Whirlpool Corporation is one of the leading global Companies with annual sales that are in excess of $19 billion (WhirlpoolCorp.com, 2010). Whirlpool Corporation areas of business operations are focused on marketing and manufacturing of home appliances worldwide and is currently the largest home appliance manufacturing Company in the world today (WhirlpoolCorp.com, 2010).

With business operations and distribution centers located all over the world facilitated by a workforce of more than 70,000 employees, Whirlpool Corporation is certainly a formidable Company to reckon with in the home appliances industry.

What factors emerged at Whirlpool that impacted its talent needs

Whirlpool Corporation rapid expansion of its business operations has taken place over the past 40 years; in early 1970s, Whirlpool Corporation business strategic objectives shifted towards capturing the world market (Goldsmith and Carter, 2010). The result was rapid globalization of the Company’s business operations that saw it presence expand to all major continents such as Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America.

This meant that the Company had to also increase their human resource to match their personnel needs which was the driving force of the Company. Over the last twenty years and after the acquisition of Maytag Corporation, Whirlpool Corporation urgency for top notch personnel become even more pressing given that it was now a leader in the industry (Goldsmith and Carter, 2010).

In order to remain competitive Whirlpool Corporation needed to be innovative, besides it had now became a global leader in manufacture of home appliances products and therefore needed to set the trend or face being overtaken.

With it series of acquisitions during this period and it numerous business subsidiaries at every major continent, the Company was constantly under pressure to source and equip itself with human resource at every level of it operations in order to be effective (Goldsmith and Carter, 2010).

In addition the Company faced the challenge of acquiring experienced and innovative personnel if it was to remain relevant; this was because of the nature of the home appliance industry that meant the Company had to keep pace with consumers needs. The fact that the quality of human resource was a significant factor that greatly influenced the success of an Organization only fueled the scramble for talented personnel that were largely scarce to find at the time.

Finally, the human resource industry had gradually shifted over time to a situation where talented personnel were more in demand than the industry could supply; this meant that employees could afford changing employers in search of better packages thereby promoting a culture of job-hopping that further complicated the situation.

How expanding globally changed the talent requirements at Whirlpool

These unique combinations of factors and the changing global environment in the business industry ensured that talented human resource became a priority to most of the leading Corporations in the world. Faced with a constant need of talented employees that were increasingly becoming hard to secure, Whirlpool Corporation had to think outside the box in order to benefit from an efficient human resource.

The result was an in house leadership model; a talent management model that would serve to nurture good talent through trainings and job experience exposure in order to address the human resource challenges caused by their global expansion (Goldsmith and Carter, 2010).

The leadership model developed by Whirlpool would drastically change the Company’s approach to personnel recruitment and human resource management because of several reasons. Foremost, the globalization of the Company meant that the Organization needed leaders rather than ordinary employees in order to continue being competitive, this model enabled them to achieve that.

The Company also needed to utilize the available human resource that it had by effectively grooming all employees that had the potential to become efficient leaders. Finally, the Company needed to develop a set of desirable characteristics among its employees that would ensure they were equipped to work at any branch of the Organizations global network.

How Whirlpool used its Leadership Model to manage its talent

Whirlpool leadership model was developed to address three key objectives: one, to specifically address and strengthen the organizations human resource weaknesses that prevailed at the time. Two, the leadership model was developed as part of a broader framework of the Company’s business strategic objective that was meant to facilitate the Organizational growth.

Finally, the leadership model was designed in order to raise the benchmark of nurturing and defining talent within the organization henceforth (Goldsmith and Carter, 2010). The Organizations leadership model is a complex framework that incorporates a total of twelve desirable attributes in employees referred as competencies that requires high level of efficient coordination (Goldsmith and Carter, 2010).

One of the major strengths of the leadership model is it integration within the Organizations culture and work processes, this means that the concept of the model is contained at every aspect of employee work procedures. In addition, the Company customized it performance review processes and promotions assessment in line with the concept behind the leadership model, thereby creating an efficient and well linked system of leadership grooming method.

The ideas of the leadership model were introduced to employees and the Company leaders through guides and trainings. It is this leadership model that was most effective in human resource management within the organization; the idea behind the leadership model also led to determination of the four Top Talent Indicators (Goldsmith and Carter, 2010).

How Whirlpool used metrics to improve the quality of talent hired

Quality of hire metrics in Whirlpool Corporation is a form of a benchmark that determines the overall capability of a candidate based on the outcome of a Master Assessor Program (MAP) that is used to measure variables of interest (Goldsmith and Carter, 2010). The metric determines the quality of hired employee by measuring their work output at two key stages, after six months and after one year based on four criteria; promotability, satisfaction, leadership and overall performance.

Each of these criteria is assessed independently and is further segmented by individual and function. Since the quality of hire metric is based on the reliability of the Company’s MAP process, its output results therefore indicate the success of MAP process in identifying and retaining top talent.

As such the Organizational metric assessment is a tool that has validated the efficiency of the MAP process in hiring talented employees. Indeed, the quality of hire metrics assessment for most new employees indicates that more than half of them are ranked on level 4 and 5 on a maximum of 5 point scale (Goldsmith and Carter, 2010).

Future consideration at Whirlpool related to managing and sustaining talent

Whirlpool Corporation is currently in the process of developing MAP Level II training that would further promote the capacity and capability of the Company to identify and hire top talent (Goldsmith and Carter, 2010). In order for the Company to continue obtaining quality talent and benefit from the strengths of a competent workforce there is no doubt that the organization must retain its core programs of human recruitment programs namely current MAP process including the upcoming MAP Level II.

This is because acquisition of skilled employees is the first step to having efficient, productive and talented employees (Silzer and Dowell, 2010). In addition the Company must continue to improve the existing human resource management strategies that are already in place such as performance appraisals, leadership models and succession planning.

References

Goldsmith, M. & Carter, L. (2010). Best Practices in Talent Management: How the World’s Leading Corporations Manage, Develop, and Retain Top Talent. San Francisco: Pfeiffer.

Silzer, R., & Dowell, B. (2010). Strategy-driven Talent Management: A leadership Imperative. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

WhirlpoolCorp.com. (2010). Whirlpool Corporation. Retrieved from https://www.whirlpoolcorp.com/