The Strategic Workforce Planning Process

The Strategic Workforce Planning Process assignment is Week 3's largest deliverable — worth 7%, more than either graded discussion forum — and it is anchored to Weekly Learning Outcome 1 and CLO 2, drawing on both Chapter 9 (job and work analysis, including discrimination-adjacent hiring criteria) and Chapter 10 (the four-component strategic workforce planning framework). It asks you to do something the week's other deliverables don't: examine two real companies' documented legal history around hiring, connect that history to their workforce planning, and then contrast it with a company that got SWP right. This guide restates the requirements as a checklist, walks a research strategy for the two required court cases, breaks down each required section of the paper, maps the requirements to the grading rubric, and closes with a structure outline and a Quick Reference table.

The Prompt, Restated

Before beginning, review Chapters 9 and 10, the Davis (2022) How to Win the Talent War article, the Altman (2020) "Moving the Needle" with Limited Resources article, the Tedrick (2023) article on improving DEIB outcomes, and the Workforce Cap-Agility chapter in Sripada's (Ed., 2020) Leading Human Capital in the 2020s.

The assignment sets up the task directly: you will consider the hiring practices of Abercrombie & Fitch and Hooters, two companies that have faced controversy and court cases based on the hiring and not hiring of certain employees — a direct reflection of each company's strategic workforce planning process. First, search court cases relating to these two companies to understand them, and discuss the outcomes of each. Then reflect on whether each company used the proper hiring strategy, taking discrimination into consideration. Next, identify a different company whose strategic workforce planning process helped make it stronger, explaining specifically why you selected it and how the strategy enhanced the company. In the paper, you must:

• Directive 1 — Identify at least two court cases (one for each company) relating to Abercrombie & Fitch and Hooters.
• Directive 2 — Discuss the outcomes of each court case.
• Directive 3 — Reflect on each company's strategic workforce planning.
• Directive 4 — Identify a company in which the strategic workforce planning process strengthened the company, giving supporting facts and rationale.

Canvas lists the formatting requirements as a checklist. Meeting every item is a floor for a passing grade, independent of the quality of the analysis.

Both companies have well-documented legal histories tied to hiring practices, which makes them tractable research targets, but you still need to locate a specific, citable case for each rather than relying on general reputation.

What to Look For

• Abercrombie & Fitch — the company's hiring practices have drawn scrutiny tied to its "look policy," a dress-and-appearance standard that has intersected with religious accommodation and race/national-origin discrimination claims in hiring decisions. Search terms like "Abercrombie Fitch EEOC lawsuit look policy" or "Abercrombie Fitch hiring discrimination case" in the UAGC Library databases or a general search surface documented litigation and settlements.
• Hooters — the company's hiring practices center on its use of appearance- and gender-based hiring criteria for its server positions, which has drawn both discrimination complaints from applicants excluded by the policy and legal defenses asserting a bona fide occupational qualification (BFOQ). Search terms like "Hooters hiring discrimination lawsuit" or "Hooters gender hiring case" surface the relevant litigation history.
• Prioritize cases with a documented, citable outcome — a settlement, consent decree, or court ruling — over an open or unresolved complaint, since Directive 2 requires you to discuss the outcome.
• Secondary coverage — news reporting, legal-industry analysis, or law-review discussion — helps you explain a case's significance beyond the bare docket facts and often qualifies as one of your two required outside sources.

Directive 1 asks you to identify at least one case for each company — name the parties, the court or agency, and the year. Directive 2 asks you to discuss the outcome of each: a settlement amount, a consent decree, required policy changes, or a court ruling, along with what the case determined about the employer's hiring conduct.

A Reliable Structure for This Section

For each company, state the case first in one or two sentences: who brought the claim, against what specific hiring or appearance policy, and on what legal theory (religious accommodation, race or national-origin discrimination, gender discrimination, or a BFOQ dispute). Then state the outcome: the settlement figure or ruling, and any required changes to the company's hiring practices going forward. Cite the source for every specific factual claim — a settlement figure or court finding needs a citation.

Directive 3 is where the paper moves from legal reporting into the course's own analytical framework. "Reflect on each company's strategic workforce planning" means applying Chapter 10's four components — talent inventory, workforce forecasts, action plans, and control and evaluation — to ask whether each company's hiring criteria were the product of a deliberate, well-governed SWP process, or an action plan that skipped the control-and-evaluation step that should have caught the discrimination risk before it became a lawsuit.

Questions to Work Through for Each Company

• Action plans — was the hiring criterion at issue (the look policy, the server-appearance standard) a deliberate strategic choice tied to a business rationale, or an unexamined practice that simply persisted?
• Control and evaluation — did the company have a process for checking whether its hiring criteria created legal or reputational risk before a court case forced the issue? A strong control-and-evaluation function should catch a discriminatory-in-practice policy before litigation does.
• Talent inventory and forecasting — did the appearance-based hiring criterion actually serve a legitimate talent or business need identified through work analysis (Chapter 9), or did it substitute a superficial, discrimination-adjacent proxy for a genuine KSAO requirement?
• The DEIB angle — the Tedrick (2023) article on improving DEIB outcomes is useful here: it argues many executives fail to bring their organizations into compliance with diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging standards, and offers innovation-based approaches leaders can use instead. Use it to frame what each company's SWP process should have included to avoid the litigation.

Directive 4 asks you to pivot to a different company — one whose strategic workforce planning process made it demonstrably stronger — and to give supporting facts and rationale for your choice. This is the paper's constructive counterpart to the Abercrombie/Hooters analysis: after examining what happens when SWP goes wrong or unexamined, show what it looks like done well.

Where to Look for a Strong Example

• 3M's leadership-succession practices, discussed in Chapter 10 itself, are a ready-made, textbook-grounded example: a common set of leadership behaviors links assessment, development, and succession practices company-wide, and the chapter documents this as a deliberate, CEO-driven system rather than a reactive scramble.
• The Sripada (Ed., 2020) Workforce Cap-Agility chapter offers a framework for organizational agility aligned with labor productivity — a company that visibly restructured its workforce planning around agility principles during a disruption (technology shift, market contraction) is a strong, citable example.
• The Altman (2020) "Moving the Needle" article discusses how COVID-19 affected HR technology investment — a company that used the disruption to strategically overhaul its workforce planning technology and process, rather than merely reacting, fits Directive 4 well.
• Any company you can document with specific facts — headcount changes, a named strategic initiative, a measurable outcome like retention or productivity gains tied explicitly to a workforce-planning decision — is a defensible choice, provided you can cite the source.

A 3–4 page paper with four required directives, an introduction, and a conclusion needs a deliberate section plan. The outline below maps cleanly onto the four directives and the required introduction/conclusion structure.

1. Title page (separate page — not counted in the 3–4 page body).
2. Introduction, ending in a clear thesis statement identifying the two companies, previewing the paper's argument about their hiring practices and strategic workforce planning, and naming the contrasting company.
3. Section 1 — Abercrombie & Fitch: the court case and its outcome (Directives 1–2).
4. Section 2 — Hooters: the court case and its outcome (Directives 1–2).
5. Section 3 — Reflection on each company's strategic workforce planning, using Chapter 10's four-component framework (Directive 3).
6. Section 4 — A company strengthened by its strategic workforce planning process, with supporting facts and rationale (Directive 4).
7. Conclusion, restating the thesis in light of the analysis and closing on what the contrast between the three companies demonstrates about SWP done poorly versus well.
8. References page (separate page — not counted in the 3–4 page body).

The assignment names five competencies it intends to practice: strategic workforce planning, labor law, labor relations, recruitment, and diversity. Map your paper's sections to these competencies explicitly, since a rubric-aligned paper reads as a series of demonstrated skills rather than a general essay.

Before submitting, review the Strategic Workforce Planning Process grading rubric under the Settings icon in Canvas and confirm each competency is visibly addressed, not just implied.

• Vague or unverifiable cases. "Abercrombie has faced lawsuits over its hiring" without naming a specific, citable case does not satisfy Directive 1.
• Reporting the outcome without the issue, or the reverse. Directive 2 needs both — what happened and how it was resolved.
• Skipping the SWP framework in Directive 3. A reflection that discusses only fairness or ethics, without applying Chapter 10's four components, misses half of what Directive 3 asks for.
• A Directive 4 example disconnected from the rest of the paper. Choosing a company without tying the choice back to the same four-component framework used in Directive 3 makes the paper read as two unrelated halves.
• Skipping the thesis statement. Canvas names this as a specific checklist item — an introduction without an explicit thesis sentence will be marked down.
• Fewer than two outside sources. The assignment requires at least 2 scholarly/credible sources beyond the course text — case coverage for each company plus one of the week's assigned articles is an efficient way to meet this.
• Formatting slips. Missing the title-page spacing rule, wrong page count (body must be 3–4 pages, excluding title and references), or an incomplete references page are easy, avoidable point losses.