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7HR02 Assignment Example

July 3, 2026
Posted by: Fletcher Samuel
Category: CIPD Level 7

7HR02 Resourcing and Talent Management to Sustain Success is a specialist unit in the CIPD Level 7 Advanced Diploma in Strategic People Management. It examines how organisations attract, select, develop and retain the people they need to deliver sustained organisational performance in competitive labour markets. The unit covers employer branding and the employee value proposition, workforce planning, recruitment and selection methods (including the growing role of technology and AI), succession planning, talent pipelines, retention strategy and performance management — all approached from a strategic, evidence-based perspective. Assessed through four extended answers to a case study scenario, 7HR02 tests your ability to construct original, persuasive arguments supported by wider reading and real organisational examples, not simply to describe theory.

Question 1

AC 1.4 Compare different approaches organisations use to build and maintain a positive reputation in labour markets. How could AAG strengthen its employee value proposition?

Organisations compete for talent in labour markets much as they compete for customers in product markets, and reputation is the currency of that competition. Four broad approaches to building and maintaining labour market reputation can be distinguished, each resting on different assumptions about how reputation is created.

The first is the marketing-led employer branding approach, which treats the organisation’s identity as an employer as a brand to be defined, packaged and promoted through careers websites, employee testimonial videos, social media campaigns, recruitment advertising and employer awards (CIPD, 2025a). Its strength is speed and control: the organisation decides the message and pushes it into the market, which suits employers who are little known or misunderstood. AAG’s social media vacancy campaigns sit within this tradition. Its weakness is the “say–do gap”: branding that outruns reality is quickly exposed, and the reputational damage of exposure exceeds the benefit of the original promotion — as BrewDog discovered in 2021 when former employees’ open letter contrasted its progressive brand with their lived experience. For AAG, whose exit interviews reveal meaningless appraisals, poor rostering and stalled careers, aggressive external branding without internal repair would be actively dangerous.

The second is the employer-of-choice approach, which builds reputation from the inside out: invest in substantive employment practices reward, flexibility, development, wellbeing, voice and let reputation follow from genuine employee experience (Taylor, 2021). Word-of-mouth from 1,200 employees, multiplied through review platforms, becomes the marketing. This approach produces durable, credible reputation, but it is slow, expensive, and requires sustained leadership commitment; it also concedes that the employer cannot fully control the narrative.

The third, increasingly dominant, is the co-created reputation approach, which recognises that in the era of Glassdoor, Indeed reviews and professional social networks, labour market reputation is authored primarily by current and former employees rather than by the employer (CIPD, 2025a). Organisations adopting this approach actively monitor review platforms, respond to criticism, close feedback loops internally, and treat candidate experience including that of rejected applicants as reputational behaviour. Its strength is authenticity and market intelligence; its weakness is vulnerability, since a minority of aggrieved voices can dominate, and clinical organisations such as AAG face the added complexity that employee reviews sit alongside client reviews of the same clinics.

The fourth is the purpose- and values-led approach, in which reputation is anchored in what the organisation stands for sustainability, ethics, social contribution appealing to candidates’ desire for meaningful work. Health-sector employers often lead with patient outcomes; in aesthetics, purpose can credibly centre on clinical safety, practitioner professionalism and client confidence, differentiating AAG from a sector sometimes stigmatised as commercially driven. The approach’s weakness is fragility under contradiction: purpose claims collapse if commercial pressure visibly overrides clinical judgement, so governance must guarantee the promise.

A fifth, hybrid mechanism deserves mention: accreditation and awards — Great Place to Work certification, sector employer awards, or visible investment in accredited training. These function as third-party warranties of employment quality, valuable precisely because they are not self-authored; their weakness is commodification, as candidates increasingly discount badges that appear purchasable, and preparation costs are non-trivial for a 1,200-employee organisation (Taylor, 2021).

These approaches are not mutually exclusive; the comparison suggests they are sequential. Marketing-led branding amplifies whatever exists so substance must precede promotion; co-created reputation makes the say–do gap unhidable; and purpose provides the narrative thread. The practical implication is that AAG should fix the experience, then broadcast it.

Strengthening AAG’s employee value proposition. An EVP is the distinctive deal tangible and intangible that an organisation offers in exchange for employees’ contribution (CIPD, 2025a). AAG’s exit data effectively writes the EVP diagnosis: the current deal fails on career progression, workload, flexibility and the valuing of performance. Five moves would strengthen it.

First, make career architecture the EVP centrepiece. The proposed career pathways for clinical and non-clinical staff directly answer the most strategic exit theme; visible progression routes for example, from aesthetician to senior practitioner to clinical lead convert AAG’s multi-country clinic network from a collection of jobs into a career proposition, and evidence consistently links development opportunity to retention of early-career professionals (CIPD, 2024a).

Second, turn flexibility from complaint into differentiator. Poor rostering is an EVP failure that technology and policy can reverse: self-rostering within clinical safety parameters, advance schedule publication, and genuine part-time and annualised-hours options would be distinctive in the aesthetics sector, where small competitors struggle to offer such sophistication.

Third, segment the proposition. A single EVP for doctors, nurses, aestheticians and client support staff will be too generic to persuade any of them (Taylor, 2021). International recruits need an EVP that includes relocation, housing support and cultural integration precisely the failure points identified while early-career nurses need development velocity and workload protection.

Fourth, substantiate before promoting. Retire the initiatives employees call gimmicky, deliver the induction, appraisal and rostering reforms, and only then relaunch external branding using authentic employee stories and review-platform evidence rather than corporate claims.

Fifth, measure reputation as a KPI: Glassdoor/Indeed ratings, offer-acceptance rates, quality-of-hire and candidate experience scores should sit on the People Team dashboard alongside vacancy and turnover rates, closing the loop between EVP investment and labour market outcomes. Measurement also disciplines authenticity: if internal engagement scores and external ratings diverge from the promoted EVP, the brand not the data, is what needs correcting.

In short, AAG’s reputational strategy should migrate from the marketing-led approach it has instinctively adopted towards an employer-of-choice core with co-created amplification: an EVP rebuilt around careers, flexibility and being valued because that is the deal its own leavers have said is broken.

Question 2

AC 2.3 Analyse how technology could be further used to improve attraction and selection processes at AAG.

Technology now permeates every stage of resourcing, but its value depends on deployment choices: the same tools can widen talent pools and strip out bias, or automate discrimination at scale (Hunkenschroer and Luetge, 2022). For AAG, operating across multiple European jurisdictions with acute clinical shortages, four clusters of technology merit analysis.

Attraction technologies. AAG already advertises through social media and sector platforms; the next maturity level is programmatic job advertising, which uses algorithms to buy and place adverts dynamically where target candidates browse, optimising spend against response valuable for hard-to-fill nursing roles where generic job boards underperform. A recruitment CRM and talent-pooling platform would let AAG nurture relationships with past applicants, agency-sourced international nurses, and vocational trainees before vacancies arise, converting recruitment from episodic transactions into pipeline management (CIPD, 2024a). Employee-advocacy tools that make it easy for AAG’s practitioners to share vacancies and content amplify the most credible attraction channel peers at negligible cost. Analytically, the attraction gain is precision and reach; the risk is algorithmic narrowing, since optimisation can quietly exclude older candidates or under-represented groups from ever seeing adverts, an adverse-impact risk that requires audit of targeting criteria.

Screening and matching technologies. AI-enabled CV parsing and skills-matching can compress AAG’s time-to-shortlist for high-volume support roles, and chatbots can handle applicant queries in multiple languages around the clock materially improving candidate experience across European markets and for international applicants in different time zones. The critical caution is bias: machine-learning screeners trained on historical hiring data reproduce historical preferences, as Amazon’s abandoned CV-screening experiment famously demonstrated, and opacity makes such bias hard to detect (Hunkenschroer and Luetge, 2022). The regulatory context sharpens this: under the EU Artificial Intelligence Act, AI systems used in recruitment and selection are classified as high-risk, triggering obligations around risk management, data governance, transparency and human oversight (Regulation (EU) 2024/1689). Since AAG operates across EU member states, any AI screening it deploys must be procured and governed to this standard, a compliance reality that favours transparent, validated tools over black-box vendors.

Assessment and selection technologies. Three technologies could address AAG’s specific selection problems. First, asynchronous and live video interviewing with structured, scored questions would standardise selection across countries and clinics, improving reliability and reducing the inconsistency that plagues devolved hiring; recorded interviews also enable calibration and audit. Second, online psychometric and situational judgement assessments offer validity for client-facing roles where interpersonal judgement predicts performance meta-analytic evidence continues to support structured, multi-method selection over unstructured interviews (Sackett et al., 2022). Third, and most interestingly for AAG’s turnover problem, virtual realistic job previews video or VR walk-throughs of clinic life, shift patterns and client interactions set accurate expectations before acceptance. Since AAG’s turnover concentrates among early-career staff citing workload and work–life balance, unrealistic expectations at entry are plausibly part of the mechanism; realistic previews trade a modest reduction in offer acceptance for measurably better early retention (Taylor, 2021).

Technology also speaks to AAG’s assessment centre problem. Centres are costly and, on AAG’s own evidence, unproven for senior clinical hires. Rather than abandoning rigour, AAG could digitise it: virtual assessment centres reduce venue, travel and panel costs across a multi-country footprint, while structured digital scoring enables the predictive-validity analysis AAG currently lacks connecting selection scores to subsequent performance and tenure data to establish, empirically, which exercises predict effective senior clinicians. The analytical point is that technology’s contribution here is not automation but evaluation: an applicant tracking system with decent analytics would let AAG measure source effectiveness, time-to-fill, cost-per-hire, offer-acceptance and first-year attrition by channel evidence-based resourcing that its current initiative-by-initiative approach conspicuously lacks (CIPD, 2024a).

Limits and conditions. Three conditions determine whether these technologies improve or degrade AAG’s resourcing. First, candidate experience: automation must reduce friction, not humanity clinical professionals in a sellers’ market will abandon processes that feel impersonal, so high-touch human contact should be preserved at decision points. Second, data protection: GDPR requires lawful basis, transparency and minimisation in processing applicant data, and automated-decision provisions restrict fully automated rejection; human review must be designed in. Third, capability: tools amplify the process they are dropped into. Structured interviews conducted badly on video are still bad selection; recruiter and manager training remains the complement to every platform purchase.

A further application connects selection to AAG’s wider talent strategy. Skills-based hiring platforms and internal talent marketplaces: systems that match people to roles, secondments and projects on verified skills rather than job histories would let AAG widen candidate pools for hard-to-fill roles (assessing transferable clinical capability rather than exact title matches) and surface internal candidates before external search, reinforcing the career pathways and succession pools discussed elsewhere in this review (CIPD, 2024a). For clinic support roles where vocational pipelines have disappointed, skills-based assessment also removes unnecessary qualification screens that exclude capable local candidates, a documented benefit of the skills-first movement.

Technology can also repair the leak between selection and retention. AAG’s exit data identifies inconsistent departmental onboarding as an early-experience failure; digital onboarding platforms structured pre-boarding content, task workflows for managers, buddy matching, and 30/60/90-day pulse checks standardise exactly the stage currently left to individual managers, and pulse analytics would give the People Team early warning of the disengagement that precedes early-career resignations. Although onboarding sits at the boundary of selection, the candidate’s psychological journey does not observe that boundary: a seamless digital experience from application through first months is itself an attraction message in a market where applicants compare notes.

In sum, technology’s highest-value applications at AAG are pipeline-building CRM, multilingual candidate-experience automation, structured video selection for cross-country consistency, realistic previews targeted at the turnover-critical early-career segment, and above all analytics that convert AAG’s resourcing from intuition to evidence, all governed to the AI Act’s high-risk standard.

Question 3

AC 3.4 Critically evaluate succession planning approaches, including how AAG can utilise such approaches to help combat skills gaps.

Succession planning is the process of identifying and developing people to fill critical roles and capabilities in the future, and its methods have evolved through three broad generations, each of which merits critical evaluation before considering AAG’s use of them.

Traditional replacement planning identifies named successors typically two or three per key post recorded on replacement charts with readiness ratings (“ready now”, “ready in two years”). Its strengths are clarity and risk management: for genuinely critical single points of failure, such as AAG’s medical directors or country clinical leads, knowing who could step in tomorrow is basic governance. Its weaknesses are well documented. It assumes organisational structures stay stable long enough for plans to mature; it creates “crown prince” effects in which anointed successors relax while unanointed talent disengages or leaves; conducted secretly it demotivates, conducted openly it creates promises organisations may not keep; and above all it tends to reproduce the incumbent successors are selected for resemblance to current post-holders, embedding homogeneity and undermining diversity in leadership pipelines (Taylor, 2021). For a multi-country organisation, replacement charts drawn clinic-by-clinic also trap talent locally.

Talent-pool approaches respond to these weaknesses by developing pools of high-potential people for categories of future roles rather than named successors for specific posts. Individuals are typically identified through performance–potential assessment most visibly the nine-box grid and developed through accelerated programmes, stretch assignments and secondments. The strengths are flexibility (pools survive restructures), motivation (more people see a route upward) and development orientation. The critical weaknesses concentrate on the identification mechanism: nine-box placements rely on manager judgements of “potential” that are conceptually vague, empirically unreliable and demonstrably susceptible to similarity bias, with women and minority-group employees systematically under-identified where criteria are subjective (CIPD, 2025b). There is also a transparency dilemma telling people they are in the pool risks entitlement and leaver-signalling among those excluded; secrecy forfeits the motivational benefit. Robust practice therefore requires behaviourally anchored potential criteria, calibration panels, diversity monitoring of pool composition, and honest communication that pool membership is an investment, not a promise.

Skills-based and agile succession planning: the emerging third generation shifts the unit of analysis from roles to critical capabilities. Rather than asking “who replaces the head of nursing?”, it asks “what is our forward supply of aesthetic injectors, laser practitioners and clinic managers, and how do we build it?” integrating succession with strategic workforce planning and treating internal mobility, reskilling and build-borrow-buy decisions as one system (CIPD, 2024b). Its strength is precisely what AAG needs: it addresses skills gaps, not just leadership vacancies, and it accommodates volatile demand. Its weaknesses are data-hunger: it requires credible skills inventories and demand forecasts and diffuseness: without discipline it becomes an abstraction that never lands in development plans.

A related framework, the leadership pipeline model, structures succession around the distinct transitions between leadership levels from managing self to managing others to managing managers arguing that each turn requires different skills and values, not more of the same. Its contribution is developmental precision: AAG’s excellent practitioners repeatedly promoted into clinic management without transition support illustrate the failure it predicts. Its limitation is its corporate-hierarchy assumptions, which map awkwardly onto flat clinical structures where expertise, not management, is the primary ladder.

Critically, the evidence across all approaches suggests succession planning fails less through model choice than through execution: plans divorced from development (“lists that gather dust”), assessment without calibration, and pipelines that leak diversity at each stage. The approaches are best treated as layers, not alternatives to replacement discipline for a small set of truly critical posts, transparent pools for leadership bench strength, and skills-based planning for scarce clinical capabilities.

Utilising succession approaches to combat AAG’s skills gaps. AAG’s presenting problem is not primarily executive succession but a 12% vacancy rate in nursing and practitioner roles and 18% turnover concentrated in early careers, a capability gap. Five applications follow.

First, AAG should apply skills-based succession planning to its critical clinical capabilities, quantifying demand by clinic and country against projected procedure growth, mapping current supply and flight risk, and making explicit build-borrow-buy choices. Given European shortages, “buy” is demonstrably difficult; the strategic answer is to build.

Second, build through a grow-your-own clinical academy: structured internal pathways that develop client support staff into aestheticians, aestheticians into practitioners, and nurses into advanced injectors, with sponsored qualifications and supervised practice hours. This simultaneously combats the skills gap and repairs the career-progression grievance driving turnover succession planning and retention become the same intervention.

Third, use the tailored development programmes and secondments AAG’s leadership already proposes as the pool-development engine: cross-clinic and cross-country secondments spread scarce expertise, test potential in real conditions (a more valid assessment than nine-box opinion), and knit a fragmented network into one internal labour market. Secondments into the centralised client-support function and back also build the hybrid clinical-commercial capability clinic managers need.

Fourth, apply replacement discipline narrowly to genuinely critical posts medical leadership, regulatory-accountable roles with at least two successors each and readiness reviewed twice yearly, ensuring clinical governance continuity.

Fifth, instrument the pipeline for equity and effectiveness: monitor pool composition against workforce demographics, track conversion (pool → promotion), internal fill rates for practitioner vacancies, and time-to-competence from the academy. AAG’s history of unevaluated initiatives assessment centres with “no conclusive evidence” is a warning; succession planning must be built measurable from day one.

The critical conclusion is that succession planning, reconceived as capability pipeline management rather than executive replacement charts, is arguably AAG’s single most strategic lever: it converts the organisation’s scale 1,200 employees across Europe from a coordination burden into a talent supply advantage that no local competitor clinic can match.

Question 4

AC 4.1 Discuss the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches that AAG could adopt to manage and enhance employee performance.

AAG’s exit interviews contain a damning verdict — “the annual staff appraisal is meaningless” — that makes performance management both a retention issue and a performance issue. Four broad approaches merit discussion.

The traditional annual appraisal with ratings remains the default architecture: yearly documented reviews, objectives, and a rating often linked to pay. Its strengths are real: it creates a formal record supporting reward, promotion and capability decisions; it guarantees every employee at least one structured conversation; and ratings provide comparable data for talent processes such as the succession pools discussed in Question 3. Its weaknesses, however, are precisely those AAG is experiencing. Annual frequency makes feedback too late to change anything; assessments suffer recency, halo and idiosyncratic-rater effects, so ratings measure raters as much as performees; the pay linkage converts development conversations into negotiations; and the ritual consumes enormous managerial time for little measured performance return; the CIPD’s synthesis of the evidence concludes that annual ratings-centred appraisal shows weak links to actual performance improvement (CIPD, 2025c). When employees describe appraisal as meaningless, the instrument has lost the legitimacy on which any performance system depends.

Continuous performance management replaces or supplements the annual event with frequent, lightweight check-ins short, forward-looking conversations about progress, priorities, obstacles and development, often supported by apps for goal tracking and instant feedback. Adobe’s widely cited abandonment of annual ratings for “check-ins”, and Microsoft’s shift to growth-oriented “Connects”, illustrate the corporate movement. Strengths: feedback arrives in time to be useful; the approach builds manager–employee relationships (the strongest single influence on engagement); and for AAG’s early-career nurses and support staff the turnover epicentre regular attention directly answers the feeling of being unvalued. Weaknesses: it multiplies demands on manager capability and time in clinics already stretched by vacancies; without minimum structure, quality varies with each manager exactly the inconsistency that ruined AAG’s departmental onboarding; and abolishing ratings entirely can degrade the data that reward and succession decisions need, which is why several early adopters quietly reintroduced simplified assessments (CIPD, 2025c).

Strengths-based and coaching approaches reframe the conversation from deficit-correction to deploying and developing what people do well, drawing on evidence that strengths-focused feedback produces greater performance improvement than weakness-focused criticism. The strength of this approach for AAG is motivational fit: clinical professionals respond to mastery and growth, and coaching conversations naturally connect to the career pathways AAG is building. The weakness is boundary: in a clinical environment, safety, regulatory and quality standards are non-negotiable, and underperformance against them cannot be reframed as a strengths conversation a capability process with clear standards must sit alongside.

Multi-source (360-degree) feedback and team-based approaches widen the evidence base beyond the line manager. 360 feedback captures behaviours managers never see how a practitioner treats client support colleagues, how a clinic manager leads and is particularly apt where employees serve multiple stakeholders. Team-based performance measures (clinic-level client satisfaction, safety indicators, utilisation) recognise that aesthetic outcomes are co-produced by teams, and avoid the corrosive effects of purely individual metrics on collaboration. The weaknesses are equally established: 360 processes are administratively heavy, feedback can be politicised or bland when not anonymous and unactionable when it is, and team measures invite free-riding while masking individual excellence which matters to high performers deciding whether to stay.

Goal-based approaches and OKRs (objectives and key results) deserve separate mention. Cascading measurable objectives in OKR form, ambitious objectives with quantified key results reviewed quarterly promise alignment: every clinic and individual can see how their goals ladder to organisational priorities such as vacancy reduction, client satisfaction and safe growth. Strengths include clarity, transparency (OKRs are typically public within the organisation) and rhythm the quarterly cycle suits AAG’s volatile demand better than annual objectives frozen in January. Weaknesses are equally instructive: quantification pressure distorts what is measured (client-facing roles reduced to procedure counts risk exactly the commercial-over-clinical drift AAG must avoid); cascaded goals can become mechanical compliance; and OKR regimes transplanted from technology firms into clinical settings often collide with regulated, standardised work where “ambitious stretch” is not always desirable. Used selectively for growth projects, service improvement and support functions, rather than clinical quality goal frameworks add discipline without distortion.

Cutting across all approaches, three design truths are more important than the choice of model. First, measurement quality: whatever is assessed must relate to controllable performance; AAG’s staff covering vacancies should not be penalised by metrics depressed by understaffing. Second, manager capability is the system: CIPD evidence consistently finds that conversation quality, not process design, determines whether performance management works (CIPD, 2025c) and AAG’s inconsistent-manager problem in onboarding will replicate in performance management unless training and calibration are invested in. Third, integration: performance conversations must connect visibly to the career pathways, development programmes and succession pools of the wider Talent Management Framework, or they will again feel meaningless.

Recommendation. AAG should adopt a hybrid architecture: quarterly structured check-ins focused on priorities, wellbeing and development; a light annual summary conversation producing a simple, calibrated assessment to feed reward and succession; clinical standards managed through a separate, clearly defined quality and capability framework; team-level clinic dashboards balancing client outcomes, safety and staff indicators; and mandatory manager training with calibration panels across countries. This retains the decision-useful data of appraisal, gains the timeliness and relational value of continuous approaches, respects clinical realities, and critically replaces the discredited ritual with a system employees can experience as fair, frequent and connected to their futures.

References

CIPD (2024a) Resourcing and talent planning report 2024. London: Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. Available at: https://www.cipd.org/uk/knowledge/reports/resourcing-surveys/ (Accessed: June 2026).

CIPD (2024b) Workforce planning. Factsheet. London: Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. Available at: https://www.cipd.org/uk/knowledge/factsheets/planning-factsheet/ (Accessed: June 2026).

CIPD (2025a) Employer brand. Factsheet. London: Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. Available at: https://www.cipd.org/uk/knowledge/factsheets/recruitment-brand-factsheet/ (Accessed: June 2026).

CIPD (2025b) Succession planning. Factsheet. London: Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. Available at: https://www.cipd.org/uk/knowledge/factsheets/succession-planning-factsheet/ (Accessed: June 2026).

CIPD (2025c) Performance reviews. Factsheet. London: Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. Available at: https://www.cipd.org/uk/knowledge/factsheets/appraisals-factsheet/ (Accessed: June 2026).

Hunkenschroer, A.L. and Luetge, C. (2022) ‘Ethics of AI-enabled recruiting and selection: a review and research agenda’, Journal of Business Ethics, 178(4), pp. 977–1007. doi: 10.1007/s10551-022-05049-6.

Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 13 June 2024 laying down harmonised rules on artificial intelligence (Artificial Intelligence Act). Official Journal of the European Union, L series. Available at: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2024/1689/oj (Accessed: June 2026).

Sackett, P.R., Zhang, C., Berry, C.M. and Lievens, F. (2022) ‘Revisiting meta-analytic estimates of validity in personnel selection’, Journal of Applied Psychology, 107(11), pp. 2040–2068. doi: 10.1037/apl0000994.

Taylor, S. (2021) Resourcing and Talent Management: The Theory and Practice of Recruiting and Developing a Workforce. 8th edn. London: Kogan Page.