Page 142 - Retaining Top Employees

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130 Retaining Top Employees

number of square feet of fence painted or length of time
to complete an approved patent application).
• The skills required are not core to the business. Free
agents are usually project-oriented. If the job requires
skills that are core to your business (i.e., you have an
ongoing need for them), then you’d be better off using the
core employee hiring model.
• The skills required are rare and/or expensive. If a task
requires a specific skills set that your core employees are
unlikely to possess (for example, a sheet metal manufac-
turer wishing to install a Web site database), then a free
agent hiring model may be best.

Model 4: Outsourcing
So far, we’ve examined how you can improve retention by
changing the hiring model to accommodate more than just the
core employee, to make your environment more suited to your
employees, so they feel more at home and are thus more likely
to stay with you longer.
The next logical step is to ask, “Why hire employees to do
this job?”
Many organizations have concluded at some time that whole
parts of their business operations consist of activities in which
they shouldn’t really be engaged at all. They’ve decided that,
instead of trying to
Compaq Computers engage in these activities,
In July 2001,Compaq they should either close
announced that it would them down or hand them
no longer manufacture chips for its over to other organiza-
computers. Although Compaq had its tions and simply purchase
own chip manufacturing plants (as a
the outputs.
result of its 1998 acquisition of Digital Why would any organ-
Equipment Corporation),manage-
ization do this? Well, there
ment decided that it could not com-
are a couple of reasons:
pete effectively with dedicated chip
manufacturers such as Intel and
• Vertical integration
Advanced Micro Devices.
gone awry. Sometimes