John Chambers is the CEO of Cisco Systems, a company that manufactures and sells networking communications equipment to a wide array of customers in both the private and the public sectors. Throughout its history, Cisco’s sales have been known to grow more than 50 percent annually over five-year periods—an astronomical rate for any corporation, especially for a company as large as Cisco.

Cisco owes a great deal of its organizational performance over the years to its human resource strategy. Often, Cisco has acquired other companies mainly to gain their bright engineers. Cisco also used other tactics to recruit new employees during the technology boom in the late 1990s. For example, Cisco used focus groups to learn what types of movies and websites the best and brightest potential employees favored. Then, Cisco programmed its website to recognize visitors from its chief rival, 3Com, and greet those visitors with a special screen stating, “Welcome to Cisco; would you like a job?” Cisco figured that 3Com employees who were bold enough to visit its website were just the type of employees it needed.

Cisco has also increased its focus on hiring employees in other countries. Specifically, Cisco has concentrated intensely on recruiting and retaining employees in China. However, Cisco is not the only multinational company to recognize the importance of China’s supply of human resources—Cisco competes with other companies such as Intel and IBM for these potential employees.

In recent years, Cisco’s growth has stalled with the slowdown in the global economy. To cope with this slowing growth, Cisco has embarked on a strategy to fill positions with individuals from a novel source: Cisco. To do so, Cisco has introduced “Talent Connection,” an internal career program and website that seeks qualified Cisco employees who might not be looking for a new job. According to the company, nearly half of Cisco’s 65,000 employees have created profiles on the website; some employees have even used the website to search for jobs. Mark Hamberlin, a Cisco vice president in human resources, says that the program has saved the company “several millions of dollars” in recruiting and training expenses and that employee satisfaction with career development has increased dramatically.

In short, Cisco continues to develop new human resource management practices to compete in today’s markets. As market conditions change, though, John Chambers knows that Cisco’s human resource strategy is not yet a finished product. Instead, he understands that Cisco’s human resource strategy will also need to improve continuously to keep pace with the evolving global economy.¹