Interview with an HR Director Essay

Words: 1436
Pages: 6

We met for lunch with Marisela Williams, the Director of HR for Freedman Seating. The company produces bus seats and frame structures for buses, motor coaches, vans and specialty vehicles. It’s a family owned company that’s being around for over 150 years and employees approximately 650 workers. She has been with the company 3 years and prior to that she worked for an organization that had 350 stores across the United States with approximately 540 total employees. Below are the series of questions that we asked her along with her responses.

1. What is your company mission and what role do you play in it?? Company mission is to produce quality seats, at reasonable prices, promoting safety, providing excellent customer service while

What helped her out the most was becoming educated and having great influential teachers that taught her that when its time for an interview, you leave bias at the door and be professional with what she has learned. It was and is still not easy, but certainly doable. 9. How can recruitment be effectively targeted to diverse groups? Diverse groups can be broken down by generation, age & economic status. Providing diverse job fairs, summer help and co-op opportunities are good effective ways. An interesting example Marisela gave was in regards to summer help, where employee’s kids are hired, including the president’s & vice president’s kids. So here you have the new generation learning from the older, experience generation while being from two totally different economic statuses. This will influence recruitment down the road, as young diverse groups learn to work with one another. 10. When was the last time you terminated or coached someone out? The last time Marisela had to terminate someone was last week. She states that every termination is hard for her, because she knows it means someone loosing his/her income that provides for their family, car, home, etc... 11. Walk me through one of more challenging times you had to let someone go -- what did you try first, how did you make the decision? How much time did it take from when you first started having