Free SHRM SHRM-SCP Exam Questions

A 50-year-old family-owned restaurant has a good business model. Repeat customers are greeted by name, and their preferences are remembered. The owner visits each table to engage in conversation. Food quality is high, merging home cooking with new cuisine. The environment is elegant, welcoming, and unrushed, and the restaurant is known for its celebrity customers. Visitors to town make advance reservations.

Business decisions are typically made in family meetings. In the next six months, the owners plan to open a new location, but they worry about maintaining the same quality of personal service and name brand at the restaurant locations. The owners have relied on immediate family, relatives, and close friends to primarily staff the restaurant, since outsiders without a family connection tend to quickly leave the business. Long-time employees take advantage of time off, yet the owners are reluctant to use discipline for fear it will anger the family. The owners' children have expressed concern about continuing in the business, receiving educational degrees in marketing and management with anticipation of launching their new careers.

Realizing that they must bring on additional staff for the new location, the owners hire an HR representative with large restaurant chain recruiting experience. In addition to identifying a renowned chef to hire who currently lives in another country, the owners want to establish a bonus program. They also want to implement policies and procedures to avoid attendance issues in the future.

What steps should the HR representative take to support implementing an attendance policy that meets the owners' business strategy?

A mid-sized government contractor is in the decline phase of its organizational life. The founder and CEO is a former military pilot who started the company ten years ago. The company grew quickly from five employees to 400. The primary business contracts have been for the aerospace and submarine industries. During times of conflict, the company's business contracts tripled in size to $1 billion. Now that conflicts have subsided, the government has announced a 30% reduction in the number of airplanes and submarines to be produced. Orders from other customers have also decreased. The company's economic outlook is poor.

The CEO debates several strategic options for survival and decides that cutting costs throughout the company is the best option. Since wages and benefits are the largest budget items, the CEO solicits help from the vice president of HR. The VP is concerned and advises the CEO that simple, across-the-board cuts could severely and adversely impact the company.

Many employees are afraid of losing their jobs. The most talented employees are already leaving the company to go to the competition. The VP suggests strategically assessing each business unit and then deciding to grow, maintain, or shut down each one. The CEO asks the VP to prepare a report on the strategic options of downsizing the company and to determine the impact each option would have on the employee population.

In one of the options, the VP suggests downsizing the employee population to save money. Which method should be used for determining which employees stay and which employees leave?