1.0 Company Background

IKEA, an international brand selling own well-designed ready-to-assemble home furnishing products and other merchandises, was founded in Sweden and registered in Netherlands in 1943 by Ingvar Kamprad. It became the world’s largest furniture retailer in year 2008. Today, there are more than 300 IKEA stores in 30 over countries in the world.

Currently, the company hires up to 123,000 workers worldwide.The staff works in various departments in IKEA from communication and interior design, customer relations, design and product development, finance and business navigation, human resources, IT, logistics, marketing and communication, purchasing, restaurant, sales and sustainability and in TQE. (Inter IKEA Systems B.V., 1999 – 2013)

2.0Roles and responsibility of IKEA Human Resource Department

The Human Resource (HR) department plays a huge role in the company. In IKEA, the department is responsible to allow and give down-to-earth straight-forward people the possibility to grow as individuals and in their professional roles (IKEA, 2013). They also handle recruitment and training, succession planning and benefits management. The HR team also needs to attract and inspire co-workers. Strengthening and safeguarding the IKEA culture is also one of their jobs(IKEA 2013). In this report, the recruitment and selection process undertaken by the IKEA’s HR team will be covered in this report. Figure 1 is the organization plan in IKEA.

Figure 1: IKEA Organization Plan

Source: Extracted from http://www.slideshare.net/OsamaAlbarrak/ikea-strategic-case-study on 15 November 2013

2.1 RECRUITMENT PLAN

IKEA as the Swedish furniture chain is planning to open a new branch in Exeter, England.

It is expected that the work on the store will start in 2014 depends on the approval by the Exeter City Council. Moreover, the council also stated that