Recruiting and Selecting Case

Read the case below and answer the questions. Whole Foods Market, one of the largest retailers of organic and natural food and personal care products, is a successful company with 181 markets throughout North America and the United Kingdom. Production and sales for the company have been growing at a rate of about 20 percent per year – notable in an otherwise stagnant/slow-growing industry. Rather than offering customers the typical grocery store shopping experience, Whole Foods Markets make you feel as though you are shopping in a high-end, specialty store that just happens to be grocery store sized and offers a large variety of products. The establishment of this environment rests not in the hands of Whole Foods executives but in the hands of Whole Foods employees. Employees, called team members, are treated respectfully and given a sense of true empowerment and decisions within the company are primarily made by those teams directly affected by them. Employees are given stock options and, therefore, a personal stake in the company. The company leaders realize that the company’s success depends on Whole Foods Market team members and believe in motivating them and rewarding them appropriately for their efforts. Whole Foods also has a casual dress code that allows for individuality, covers 100 percent of full-time employee health insurance, and allows full-time employees 20 paid hours per year during which to perform volunteer work. Many Whole Foods team members left potentially better paying and higher status jobs to work with the company and are happy with their decisions. At each store people are divided into roughly eight teams and when a new person is hired provisionally, his or her team votes on whether to retain or dismiss the new person at the end of the provisional period. This is an important practice as teams’ performance – each individual on the team relies on the productivity of all the other team members in to receive additional pay. What sets Whole Foods Market apart from other grocery stores? Requirements: 100 words