Flight Centre is a name for travel agency which was started in 1981 in Sydney, Australia and started growing slowly to reach at other places of the world. In October 1995 the company made its mark in UK and the name Flight Centre UK was given to it. It was awarded as one of the top 100 companies in UK and is best known for the world fastest growing travel agencies with over 1000 locations in 2004. It follows a different strategies for business by sharing high performance and profit and this is why the tag "One Best Way" given to it.
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Recruitment:
Recruitment is the process to attract people with required qualification in enough numbers and on the time when they are required to apply for the job in company. Recruitment procedure for Flight centre is interesting process of 48 hour period and the process is divided in two days. First and the forth most thing is a person has to apply through online application form for the current vacancies. By this a person gives all the necessary information to company to know about him. If the HR manger gets all the necessary information he sends the person to next level where a telephonic discussion will be arranged. This is how the applicant gets the opportunity to know about the exact work and company policy and it also check the applicant's interest, motivation and passions. But company also look at the personality, sales ability and enthusiasm because these skills are very important for business.
After all being well an online assessment has to be complete by the applicant to find out more about his working style and characteristics. On the very next day of completion of all the above steps the person gets invitation for attending an interview because face to face interaction tells more about anyone's personality and skills. Even the applicant can ask any question and clarify all his doubts about anything regarding the job and company.
After successful completion of interview he gets the chance to meet staff and learn about him and his specific skills. This is how he gets the chance to experience 'a day in the life' of a graduate sales consultant. After that company will be in touch of the applicant with the job offer and if he accepts he will be booked into learning centre to get trained for that work.
Staff development is a major task at Flight Centre as it spends around £400,000 on skills training (Sunday Times, 2004). New employee has to undergo a training session and induction program for 12 days. The training session includes beginner learning and consulting through to management and leadership skills. The company prides on its own philosophy of promoting from within where possible, and the staffs get a clear and achievable path for career.
Lin Hilditch, manager of Flight Centre's recruitment, learning and development division, People works, said: "It is excellent feedback that our people enjoy the empowerment of the workplace we have created. We have grown up as a people-focused business, believing that our employees are our greatest asset. We are extremely innovative as a company and offer a number of extra benefits, including in-house financial planning and health and fitness services, which help our employees to focus on their personal and financial growth as well as their career progression."
Flight Centre recruits on attitude, arguing that this is the only thing it cannot train. While travel experience and an aptitude for sales are basic pre-requisites, travel-industry experience is not. The company looks for people willing to go the extra mile, hungry for success and willing to embrace the systems while not afraid to add a flavour of their own(Kirby A and Jones K, 2004). Ownership policy gives a clear view of internal recruitment method of Flight centre.
Key Drivers in the Organisations External Environment:
Key drivers in the organisations external environment can be:
Labour market conditions
Active or Passive Job Seekers
Technology
Outsourcing
Labour Market condition: this means that people for the entry stage can join flight centre on only one basis that's their education related to sales. So, the demand is high for the particular skill is high.
-Economical: as per the ownership policy of the company, economical factor drives the company's recruitment process to a positive side because when someone takes his ownership on any one of the retail store company help him to set everything and new people are hired to work at that place and some of the new people are hired to work at the old store because some employee who are experienced taken to a new store. So, it increases the company's profit and it profitable for personal level as well (Hilditch, 2004).
-Social Culture: as the staff has access to two benefits packages which are known as 'health wise' and 'money wise' it increases indirectly the work for recruitment department because company doesn't outsource any Medicare for the employees they establish their own facility of that kind for staff and for money wise company gives their employees the help of financial advisors to save their money by some pension plans etc.
Technology: there is nothing i could find in the case study and anywhere else about the technology but from my point of view company have to spend money on the software and programmes that are made to work for employees but if any problem occurs with the system there must be some team of software engineers to solve or trouble shoot that problem for that instance of time.
Active or Passive Job Seekers: in the context of Flight Centre they find the active job seekers because most of their stores are owned by the ownership policies from the internal hiring and from online application they get most of the active job seekers and from my point of view the passive job seekers rarely look for these kind of businesses.
Outsourcing: in this case outsourcing means the support that the company gets from some sources outside the company's parameter as they get loads of facilities or deals (offers) from other air companies which gives them opportunity to do a quality business by providing attractive deals so that customer agrees to pay the amount for their trip. So this is also the vital key driver of flight centres external environment.
Recruitment and its Relationship between Flight Centre
The recruitment policies of flight centre are very much different and called to be 'anthropological' business model because they recruit people to work for family of flight centre as they have divided their employees in groups. Whereas each group is of no more than 5 or 7 people because small groups are always better to work in and that group is like a family. For example if a person of group is on holiday the some other member of that group will look after his clients in the same way as the other person was doing it and as we know that things come around so it can be done with every one of the group.
Then 3 or 4 families join together to make a tribe and then it extend to villages by joining some tribes. This is how the structure of Flight centre works. So the recruitment has the most important and strong bond between the successes of company as they both are connected to each other. The company beliefs that they can earn very good from this kind of model that is why, they spend £400,000 on the recruitment, training and development processes.
Growth of a organisation can be measured as the no of employees they recruit so, it can be seen in the case of flight centre as they have more than 90 stores in UK and they have 550 employees working for them. They all play a crucial role for company's success because of the company's policy of ownership and shares or incentives that the employees get from their sales.
"The company put its achievement down to an orthodox but success full approach to people management where every store is a family and loyalty reigns supreme" (Kirby A and Jones K, 2004). This shows that company's main objective is to work like a family and recruitment helps them in keeping up this strategy by giving positive results for them.
Will this practice work in some other Organisation?
As we have seen that the recruitment process of Flight Centre is very much flat so i would say that it won't work in the similar way as it does for flight centre for all kind of industries or organisation but in some of the companies it still work as it can be seen in the same way of working for Karbonn Mobiles in India. The large organisations do not really work with this kind of method.
Conclusion:
To conclude it can be clearly seen that we got all the positive aspects about the Flight Centre form the references but from the other point of view there are some points missing but the recruitment process is very easy to work on and get good results out of that by giving good incentives and opportunities to grow.
