Answer all questions for the following “On the Job” scenario questions in your textbook. In doing so, be sure to showcase your knowledge. Feel free to use additional resources, and remember to cite all sources in APA format. Even if you only use the textbook, you must cite it. Failure to do so will result in a grade of zero for the assignment.
Chapter 17 – On The Job Scenario 17-8- Why Zappos Is Saying Goodbye to Online Job Postings. Answer questions 1-3.
Script
>> Zappos is saying goodbye to online job postings?
>> Yeah, they’re kind of shaking things up again and they’re also possibly changing the way, Betty, that people hunt for jobs. Here’s what they’re doing. They’re basically saying no more online job postings. So, nothing at LinkedIn, nothing at Monster.com. If you want to work at Zappos, what you have to do is you have to join their social network. It’s called Zappos Insider, and you become a Zappos Insider. If you do this, you get access to a bunch of information at the company. So, you can find out all the different teams that are at the company, whether it’s a marketing or a technology team. And you can find about information about the people who are on those teams. And they post Q and As and they talk about what it’s like to work at Zappos, what a typical day is like. How do you do you get a job? I know, a lot of information.
>> Yes.
>> And those people who are interested in working at Zappos, they can post their own questions. So, they can access a lot information.
>> And the thinking behind the strategy.
>> Yeah. There’s always a thought behind the process. What they realized is it’s about developing a relationship with prospective employees. What Zappos realized is that last year they looked at about 31,000 job applicants and after looking at them, they only hired about 1.5% of people. So, they essentially rejected about 30,000 applicants. And even some of those that they accepted, they weren’t a great fit for the company. So, this process really works out retention and also the quality of workers. They also thought by doing this and developing a relationship with the company and providing transparency about the company, that if they’ve got a job that opens up, they’ve already got a possible pool of applicants that are out there that know things about the company so that they can probably fill that job pretty quickly. The other thing I asked about them is that they relocated their headquarters last year to Vegas. It could be a tough job market and they did say it’s been a little bit of a challenge to fill positions. So, that could help with that as well.
>> And this is all an extension of the founder’s philosophy, right?
>> He’s a wild guy. Tony Shea. I spent some time with him about a year and a half ago. He was embarking on a plan to revitalize downtown Vegas, kind of the old Vegas part. He’s spending hundreds of millions of dollars to revitalize the area and he hired a whole team, brought in a team of experts in their prospective fields. And they’re working on healthcare, education, small business, startups. So, he’s doing that. I did ask, is this Tony’s idea, because he is such a visionary. They said no, it’s not, but he’s fully behind it. But it is a different type of company. It’s a holacracy, which means-
>> Oh, that’s right. So there’s no title, no hierarchy.
>> They have what they call hashtag titles and that kind of is a bunch of roles that a person does at a company. But they shun a hierarchy. Kind of authority spread around the company. So, it is kind of an extension of that philosophy. And one more thing I want to say in this process that they’re doing is that they’re going to kind of push content at people. So, if you’re interested in working at Zappos and you say I’m interested in the technology team, they’ll start to send you stuff about that team and stuff going on at the company that relates to positions in that area. So, it’s kind of a give and take.
>> All right. So, that’s very interesting. All right, thank you so much Carol. Carol Masser, Chief National Correspondent.
Discussion Questions
Give a few examples of how the Zappos Insider program exemplifies the new career paradigm as compared to the old career paradigm.
Is the Zappos Insider program increasing or decreasing the potential conflicts during organizational entry?
How is the Zappos Insider program providing interested applicants with a realistic job preview?
Chapter 18- On The Job Scenario 18-7g- The Ethics of AI. Answer questions 1-3
Script
>> I think one of the things we’ve all gotten a little obsessed about at the moment around AI is what’s technically possible. And I think we need to be paying much more attention to what’s culturally, appropriately, socially acceptable and works inside our laws and governments.
>> So, you’re focused on will robots share our values, not will robots take our jobs. Will they? Will they share our values?
>> Oh, another really good question, right? So, listen, we know that artificial intelligence is going to go to scale. We know it’s going to end up in lots of different places. The question becomes, how do we ensure that that’s something that we’re comfortable with, something that we feel good about, something that reflects the things we care about. And that means asking questions beyond just what can we do technically, but to ask questions about what are the values we want these objects to enshrine, who gets to decide what those values are, and how do we regulate them.
>> Are these questions being asked as often as they should be?
>> Well, I’m an anthropologist so, you know, I think the answer is no. We should ask them all the time. At least the good news is I think they’re starting to resurface. So, the more you hear talk about AI and ethics, AI and public policy, AI and governance, those are at least the beginnings of conversations about what’s the world we want to build and how we’re going to live in it.
>> So, let’s take the pro side. Let’s say these questions are asked as often as they should be. What is the potential of AI to affect our lives in positive ways?
>> So, I think if you manage to kind of think through the, where are the places that AI can be most useful, and frankly for me, again, as a social scientist, the question I always want to ask is not can we do it technically, but should we do it socially. So, are there places where AI makes better sense, not because it’s about an efficiency, but because it either has a way of making decisions that’s a little less messy than humans making it. By the same token, depending on who programs it, depending on what data they use, sometimes we have the potential of these technologies to reproduce and enshrine really longstanding in equities and bias. And that seems like not a good trend at all.
>> Right. So, what are the gravest dangers? What are the gravest dangers if these questions do not get asked?
>> I think the gravest dangers are we take the world that we live in now and we make it the world in perpetuity moving forward. So, all the things about the current world that don’t feel right is what the data reflects, right? It’s a world where women aren’t paid as much as men, where certain kinds of populations are subject to more violence, where we know that certain decisions get made in manners that are profoundly unfair. If you take all the data about the way the world has been, and that’s what you build the machinery on top of, then we get this world as our total future. And I don’t know about you, but I’d like something slightly different.
Discussion Questions
Imagine if, starting tomorrow, U.S. corporate hiring and promotion programs began using American-made AI software written by a young, white male who built subtle stereotypes against minorities, women, and older workers into the algorithms. What types of hiring and promotion conditions would these different populations expect to face? Would the changes in the hiring and promotion practices be a planned change or an unplanned change?
Continuing from the first question, would the hiring and promotion situation eventually become an internal force for organizational change? If so, how?
If the bias in the AI hiring and promotion algorithm is discovered, analyzed, and set to be corrected. Which type of employee would be likely to have a reactance – a negative reaction – about the subject? Of the eight reasons people resist change listed in the text, which would be the most likely reason these employees would have a negative reaction?
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