January 27, 2005

Social responsibility and recruiting
Posted by jr@jrothman.com">Johanna Rothman at 5:05 PM -

In The Recruiting Payoff of Social Responsibility, Gretchen Weber discusses how being socially responsible can attract a certain kind of person. In fact, here's a quote:

Researchers at Stanford University and the University of California, Santa Barbara, surveyed 800 MBA students from 11 leading North American and European business schools and found that 94 percent would accept a lower salary--an average of 14 percent lower--to work for a firm with a reputation for being environmentally friendly, caring about employees and caring about outside stakeholders such as the community.

At the end of the article, there's a dissenting voice:

"People tell me that at some point people went to work there [HP] just because it was family-oriented and because of the camaraderie, and it lost its competitive edge," Gunther says. "In business, your strength can become your weakness."

Certainly, it's true that your strengths can become your weaknesses, but not being able to deliver on the strategy is much more of a weakness than family-orientation.

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