Quality Compliance at Hawthorne Arms

This case is about a person by the name of Alistair Mackay, the director of personnel development for a company called Trianon. Trianon is a subcontractor for aviation firms and has recently been focusing on navigational displays for the next generation of European airbuses. Trianon was originally trying to acquire full ownership of a Scanner-Cathode Ray Tube Display (SCRTD) production facility in Hungary. However, after receiving a call from Henri Genadry, General Director of Joint Ventures, Mergers and Acquisitions, Display Division, Alistair is informed that the purchase of the SCRTD production facility is not happening and instead Trianon will be entering a 10 year joint venture with a government backed SCRTD Hungarian production facility.

Alistair was originally instructed to find the ideal candidate for a Project Engineer for the initial operation which involved entire ownership of a Hungarian facility; and he had three solid potential candidates lined up for the job. The only problem with this is that now, Alistair has been asked to find the ideal candidate for a Quality Compliance Manager that can be ready to be in Hungary in five to six weeks. In the following sections I will respond to the questions presented at the end of this case study which include: selecting a candidate from the three candidates provided in Exhibit A of the case, develop an outline for the candidate recruitment process Trianon used to fit with ‘best’ selection processes and the strategic needs of Trianon, and lastly to determine if HR staff should be involved in decisions relating to international business operations similar to the ones presented in this case.

As seen in Exhibit A, the case presents three potential candidates with various work experience and family backgrounds. If I had to decide within the next twenty four hours, which of the three candidates presented in Exhibit A would be most suitable for the job of Quality Compliance Manager in the joint venture project I would select Candidate 2, Janos Gabor. This choice would be slight risk mainly because, of the three candidates, Janos has fairly little experience (less than four years) with the company. However, I believe Janos’ ethnicity and family ties to Hungarian government officials far outweigh his lesser experience and there’s also the fact that Janos was recently promoted to Senior Engineer in the CRTD division which shows that clearly he must be doing a good job and has the knowledge needed to work with a CRTD production facility. All of this combined with the fact that he does not currently have a spouse or children, to me shows that he will have the most time available to dedicate to his job. The one problem I could foresee happening is the fact that Janos isn’t very well oriented in the international aspect which means that the light travel to Germany and France in the first year as Quality Compliance Manager could prove troublesome. However, the fact that he hasn’t