Alliant Techsystems Inc. (ATK) is an aerospace and defense company. The company sells missiles, ammunition and guidance systems, almost exclusively to the United States military and allied nations. The company is headquartered in Arlington, VA, close to its biggest customer. There are 14,000 different employees at the company, which has multiple locations. ATK was founded in 1990 (Yahoo! Finance, 2013). According to the company's latest annual report, its customer base is U.S. Army (29%), U.S. Navy (13%), NASA (10%), U.S. Air Force (6), other U.S. government (9%) and then commercial and foreign customers are 33% of the company's business. The company has a contract backlog of $7.8 billion, compared with annual revenues of $4.3 billion, meaning that the company has about two years' worth of backlog on its books. This paper is going to discuss the human resources strategy of the company. Clearly, Alliant has a need to bring in only high quality workers, and in doing so can help to meet the demand from its major customers. How the company handles its human resources is going to be the primary subject of this paper. Main Body -- Recruitment

ATK does several things in terms of recruiting. On the big picture level, the company manages its recruiting via an online system called Total Talent @ATK. This system functions in the same manner as many others, providing a clearing house for new openings, and for employees and prospective employees to create profiles, search for positions and submit applications. The site works both for internal and external employees. A person with a profile on the site is asked to keep the profile up-to-date. The site has several pages worth of form letters than candidates must work through in order to submit an application. These cover off current employment, past employment, education and skills, experience inventory and then there is space to upload a resume and note relocation preferences. By this point, uploading the resume is basically redundant, as every applicant will have filled in that same information into a standardized format. There are tools for internal candidates in particular, such as the development plan, talent assessment and career plan sections.

The company basically utilizes two channels for recruiting. The first is to look for professionals and the second is college recruiting. The company seeks experienced professionals in a couple of ways. First, it posts positions publicly on its website. The site serves as a portal for opportunities with the company, and it has the benefit of allowing somebody to create a profile, and then be matched to that profile at a later date. This is important because it reduces the influence of timing on the ability of the company and candidates to find the right match. The company relies in part on postings to job boards to bring in traffic to TotalTalent@ATK. In addition, ATK has visibility within its industry. Normally, the company would recruit from within its own industry because of the need for things like specialized skills and security clearances, so ATK focuses its professional recruiting on building visibility with professionals who already work for defense contractors.

The other target market for the company's recruiting is the college market. This is standard in the industry, that the company visits college campuses and recruits graduates to join the firm. Alliant has two pathways to entry for college students. The first is the company's internship program, which comes in both summer and year-round forms. This helps it to recruit from different schools, because the different schools might have different schedules with respect to internships. The internships are available in all different fields within the company. The internships are not guaranteed to lead to future paid employment, but it does represent an opportunity for the company to get to know potential future applicants. Many interns are likely to be offered a full-time position upon graduation.

Beyond the internship program, the company also recruits college graduates, and has specific positions open for new graduates to pursue. The industry has relatively low turnover, so it is often necessary to bring in new talent via the graduate route, and then seek to retain the best individuals. ATK seeks to attract graduates and interns by offering the opportunity to work on "challenging and exciting assignments," and the chance to work with experts. Thus, the company appeals strongly to intrinsic motivation, and see a high level of intrinsic motivation as a key determinant of success in the company and a key desired trait in new employees.

It is not known at this point what strategy the...

As a knowledge field with a higher level of employee motivation, ATK is hoping that they delay retirement to some extent, but the company faces constraints that concern it with respect to brining in new people. It has restrictions on things such as citizenship -- no technical workers coming over on work visas like in Silicon Valley -- and on the ability to gain security clearance, which is essential for many employees. The major recruiting challenge for ATK over the next couple of years, knowing that it has a lot of pending retirements, is to find a way to work within these constraints to attract enough skilled technical staff to replace those who are retiring.
Main Body -- Employee Development

With the pending recruiting challenges, ATK is also focusing heavily on employee development in order to build a better workforce and better prepare for the retiring boomers. The first step is employee development is to conduct a needs analysis. The process begins with estimating the different needs of the company. Forecasting is the typical technique that ATK uses in its needs analysis. Forecasting is relatively easy for a predictive exercise, because of two factors. The first is that the company's business is very stable and the second is that with two years' worth of backlog and a business that has long product development cycles, the company is already oriented towards long-term thinking. With an organizational strategy already understood, it is easy to forecast needs for the future.

Knowing the skills that the company needs to have in the future, the company looks at its current capabilities via a skills inventory and recognizes the gaps. Then if it cannot fill the gaps through recruiting, it seeks out talented young people and sets them into a development program that can help them to build the skills. This is aided by the fact that there are many experts on staff at ATK. A lot of the informal development program is to pair younger recruits with the company's experienced talent and allow the learning to take place naturally. The informal path is something the company believes in. It takes years but it works.

As far as formal employee development programs are concerned, ATK encourage education and growth among its employees. The company will take time to train people in their field, but there is little in the way of formal training. In part, this is because many of the jobs within the company are highly specialized. As such, it is not particularly feasible to run specific training programs, as those usually work best when there are opportunities for scale. One-on-one mentoring is a much more important part of the employee development program. The company even has a mentoring partnership with Florida A&M and NASA. Also, the TotalTalent@ATK site helps with professional development through things like the Career Path page, that helps employees to take formal steps towards their career dreams, and to understand what the precursor steps are as well.

Main Body -- Benefits and Pay Structure

All indirect financial compensation falls under the category of benefits. Benefits and services are typically available to all workers, and therefore this category does not include performance-based benefits and incentives. While there is no universally-agreed-upon standard of what is included in the category of benefits a typical definition would include unemployment insurance, social security and workers' compensation, which are all government-mandated programs. There is also the voluntary benefits. These including paid leave, medical and dental benefits, services like education programs or child care, insurance, retirement benefits and unpaid leaves as well. Many companies will offer a set list of benefits, while other companies are focused more on providing flexible benefits plans, where perhaps a dollar amount is identified and then the employee chooses how that dollar amount should be spent from among the different options. Some aspects of these types of benefits are restricted by law, such as the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978, which protects against discrimination on the basis of pregnancy.

The company's pension plan today is a defined contribution plan. The company has just switched on February 4, 2013 from a defined benefit plan, with older employees grandfathered in. The new plan features a "cash balance formula" and enhanced company match under a 401(k) (2013 Annual Report). This is offered on "day one," so that there is no waiting period once an employee is hired to begin with the 401(k) plan with the company. This serves as an enticement because the employees…