Recruitment, selection, and diversity management in IKEA for its limits of homogeneity in China

1. Introduction

In the article “China teaches IKEA limits of homogeneity”, the author presents the problems that IKEA has in its standardization in the Chinese market. The customer group, the pricing, and the culture make IKEA almost impossible to keep its homogeneity in its products and corporate culture. This article is an analysis on the marketing and sales perspective of IKEA. However, the problems in marketing and sales indicate problems in management, especially the human resource management. The limitation of a company to bring its standardized management in a new market indicates its failure in the previous investigation on the reality of the market, which is rooted in the issues of human resource management. If there were local employees or managers warning the reality and difficulties in China, IKEA would be better prepared and make a better marketing strategy. Thus, this paper would analyze the issues of IKEA from the perspectives of recruitment and selection, and diversity management.

2. Recruitment and selection

Recruitment and selection is the primary task in human resource management. Recruitment is to seek qualified talents that are suitable for the current needs of the company. It requires a board range of human resource activities under the guidance of the overall business strategy, annual business plan, and the budget of the company (Van Den, et al., 2010). Selection, on the other hand, is based on the recruitment via tools and methods to identity the best applicants out of the recruited group. The result of selection directly decides if the whole process of recruitment is fruitful. In every business practice, recruitment and selection is critical to its success, because the applicants who are hired through the long process stands for the