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Journal of Management
http://jom.sagepub.com/ Staffing in the 21st Century: New Challenges and Strategic Opportunities
Robert E. Ployhart Journal of Management 2006 32: 868 DOI: 10.1177/0149206306293625

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Staffing in the 21st Century: New Challenges and Strategic Opportunities†
Robert E. Ployhart*
Management Department, Moore School of Business, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208

Modern organizations struggle with staffing challenges stemming from increased knowledge work, laborshortages, competition for applicants, and workforce diversity. Yet, despite such critical needs for effective staffing practice, staffing research continues to be neglected or misunderstood by many organizational decision makers. Solving these challenges requires staffing scholars to expand their focus from individual-level recruitment and selection research to multilevel research demonstrating thebusiness unit/organizational− level impact of staffing. Toward this end, this review provides a selective and critical analysis of staffing best practices covering literature from roughly 2000 to the present. Several research-practice gaps are also identified. Keywords: staffing; personnel selection; recruitment

Staffing is broadly defined as the process of attracting, selecting, and retainingcompetent individuals to achieve organizational goals. Every organization uses some form of a staffing procedure, and staffing is the primary way an organization influences its diversity and human capital. The nature of work in the 21st century presents many challenges for staffing. For example, knowledge-based work places greater demands on employee competencies; there are widespread demographic,labor, societal, and cultural changes creating growing global shortfalls of qualified and competent applicants; and the workforce is increasingly diverse. A survey of 33,000 employers from 23 countries found that 40% of them had difficulty finding and hiring the desired talent (Manpower Inc., 2006), and approximately 90% of nearly 7,000
† I thank Ivey MacKenzie for his comments and suggestions.*Corresponding author. Tel.: 803-777-5903; fax: 803-777-6782. E-mail address: ployhart@moore.sc.edu
Journal of Management, Vol. 32 No. 6, December 2006 868-897 DOI: 10.1177/0149206306293625 © 2006 Southern Management Association. All rights reserved.

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managers indicatedtalent acquisition and retention were becoming more difficult (Axelrod, Handfield-Jones, & Welsh, 2001). These challenges might lead one to think that organizational decision makers recognize staffing as a key strategic opportunity for enhancing competitive advantage. Because talent is rare, valuable, difficult to imitate, and hard to substitute, organizations that better attract, select, and retainthis talent should outperform those that do not (Barney & Wright, 1998). Yet surprisingly, a study by Rynes, Brown, and Colbert (2002) found the staffing domain demonstrated the largest differences between academic findings and the beliefs of managers. This means that, although staffing should be one of the most important strategic mechanisms for achieving competitive advantage, organizational...