SouthWestAirlines Co.  Is a major U.S airline and operates out of Dallas's Love Field Airport. The journey of this airline company has been quite fascinating as it has braved many challenges and several price-wars and has today, expanded to become a major national carrier, serving the major cities. Let us have a brief and detailed overview of the company.

Company Overview

SouthWest Airlines started as an intra-state operator in Texas and was considered to follow the philosophy of budget airlines. It was incorporated on June 18, 1971 and started with only three Boeing 737 aircraft serving the three cities of Dallas Houston and San Antonio. Today, SouthWest Airlines claims to offer the lowest airfares serving across 59 major cities of U.S and boasts of the lowest operating cost-structure.SouthWest Airlines is represented as LUV on the NYSE, rhyming with the company's home at Dalla'sLoveField andwhich claims to represent the company's theme as well as customer relationship.

If the present performance of the company is to be discussed, its performance in the recent years is outstanding and is consistently ranked number one in terms of market share. The company's return on investment (ROI) has been increasing steadily achieving attractive growth-rate despite being in the field that is marked and characterized by economic swings.

Quite clearly, the strengths of the company lie in its low-operating costs and increased innovation in service. They have ample scope growth opportunities such as covering the smaller urban airport destinations and increased vertical integration. The company obviously faces threat from the increased cost of aviation fuel and labour and diminished consumer confidence.

Jobs

The Human Resource Management of SothWest Airlines has the unique principle of "Employees come first and Customers come second". They have mentioned that the employees are "hired by the management for the attitude and they are trained for skill". The company believes in the philosophy that the resources can be trained for to perform the tasks and hold the required skills, but attitude is something that cannot be changed. It is something that has to inculcate over time.

"Target Selection" is the name of the hiring process that company follows to interview the candidates. This process aims at matching the candidate's skills and traits to achieve the completion of the task at hand successfully. The managers trained in this program are taught to lead by coaching and encouraging rather than that of supervision and they claim to have to the lowest turn-over rate which may be attributed to the fact that almost 90 % of the managerial and supervisory positions are filled by internal resources.

Reservations

SouthWest Airlines Company follows the aggressive IS objectives that makes the whole process of reservation very efficient and agile. The online-reservation-system of the company is very easy-to-use and the graphical user interface is simple enough that even a novice can operate. They are capable of sending the emails citing about the special fares to its customers. All the changes in itinerary and cancellations are being managed automatically by the online-reservation-system.