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A rental service is a service in which customers arrive to request the hire of a rental unit. Customers arriving when all units are out on hire are turned away and considered lost to the service. Customers, successful in obtaining the hire of a unit, pay a hire fee per unit per day. A graphical tool is presented as a decision aid in determining the total number of units to be made available for hire. The graphical tool minimises the total daily relevant costs and provides an easy means of visually examining the sensitivity of the “optimal” number of units to changes in estimates of the associated demand, hire fee and cost parameters. A short account of the application of the graphical tool by a small car hire business is presented.

Early research on overqualification suggested that overqualification is primarily associated with negative attitudes and behavior. As a consequence, hiring practitioners were advised against hiring overqualified job applicants. However, recent studies have revealed that there are several potential positive consequences of overqualification. Given this change in perspective on overqualification, we examine how hiring practitioners nowadays look at overqualified job applicants, and what their considerations are for hiring an overqualified job applicant or not.

We have interviewed 33 hiring practitioners to examine their attitudes and considerations toward hiring overqualified job applicants.

Results show that hiring practitioners are aware of potential positive as well as negative consequences of overqualification and consider a variety of factors to assess how beneficial hiring an overqualified candidate will be. These factors fall under three categories: Individual considerations, interpersonal considerations and contextual considerations.

We show that overqualification is not a stigma anymore and that the decision to hire an overqualified job applicant or not depends on a mixture of factors that are carefully considered. Two of these three considerations transcend the individual level (i.e. the overqualified person), whereas most research and theories on the consequences of overqualification do not go beyond the individual level. As such, our findings call for more theory and research on interpersonal and contextual factors shaping the consequences of overqualification.

Recent labor market research has called into question whether social capital effects are causal, or are spuriously due to the influence of social homophily. This essay adopts the demand-side perspective of organizations to examine the causal status of social capital. In contrast with supply-side approaches, we argue that homophily is a key mechanism by which organizations derive social capital. We develop an approach to bolster inferences about the causal status of social capital, and illustrate these ideas using data from a retail bank.

Given the conflicting attitudes that people have toward those who report wrongdoing and a lack of empirical research specifically examining subsequent hiring, it is an open question as to whether accounting professionals would want to work with former whistleblowers. The authors examine this question using an experimental design, in which participants evaluate an employment candidate before and after the person discloses having been a whistleblower. Four manipulations of whistleblowing are used in both a within-subjects and a between-subjects manipulation. The authors’ results demonstrate that accounting professionals’ intentions to recommend a candidate for hire decrease after they are informed that a strong candidate has a whistleblowing past. A candidate is viewed most negatively, however, when discovering malfeasance and electing not to blow the whistle internally. Moreover, when the whistle is blown internally and the superior takes no action, the candidate who remained silent and chose not to continue to push the issue is viewed more negatively than the candidate who proceeded to blow the whistle externally. Although a candidate having a whistleblowing past appears to pose a cautionary signal in the interview process, participants reacted more harshly when the candidate failed to act or lacked the durable moral courage to see the matter through to completion.

This study examines how employers’ various hiring behaviors affect the formal training in Korean establishments for newly employed college graduates. I use data from the 2000 “Employer Survey on College to Work,” collected by the Korea Research Institute for Vocational Education and Training (KRIVET). The results suggest some important implications about employers’ decisions to “buy and/or make.” On the one hand, the relationships between hiring and training are far from simple. There is a substitution of skills in hiring for training after hiring, but worker training tends to be provided more by those employers who concentrate highly on employee searches. In particular, the content of additional training programs reinforces the screening criteria. On the other hand, the results suggest the persistence of conventional organizational practices in hiring and training. Training provided by employers may be somewhere in the middle of economic rationality and simple conventionality, i.e. less-than-rational behaviors.

Large corporate policy changes usually take the form of a top-down approach based on a clearly envisioned routine and an implementation plan. Yet, the authors report on a study of a bottom-up approach in which key members of a service company created a new hiring routine that supported a company-wide new human resource management (HRM) hiring policy without any prior envisioned plan. We pay particularly close attention to the perspectives of this company’s HRM professionals, line managers, and middle-level managers. The authors used the literature on routine dynamics to examine in detail which actions were taken by key members in this organization to create the new hiring routine. Through in-depth interviews, the authors found that line managers, HRM professionals, and middle-level managers significantly differed in their points of view regarding their role in the new hiring routine, and how it should work best. As a result of these different points of view, the actors took different actions that nonetheless contributed to building the new routine including creating new internal and external connections, supplying expertise, and ensuring oversight of the new way of hiring. The authors also observed that the creation of this new routine also implied conflicts as a result of different points of view and actions. Nonetheless, the end result was the establishment of a new company-wide accepted hiring routine that even surpassed the expectations of top management. With this study, the authors contribute to the literature on routine dynamics by demonstrating the generative potential of multiple points of view and conflicts in creating new routines involved in large corporate policy change by showing how misalignments between the actors’ perspectives do not need to hamper the creation of new action patterns but rather support it.