How Companies Attract And Retain Skilled Employees

The shortage of skilled workers makes it clear that many companies currently have problems finding suitable employees. On the one hand, attracting people to the company who meet the requirements is often impossible. On the other hand, many applicants do not offer the specialization and technical expertise that companies want. Or people with the desired profile can be hired but not retained for long: where there is no deeper connection, fluctuation is high.

In other cases, companies struggle with unmotivated, dissatisfied employees and complain about their lack of commitment to the company or about the employees lack of ability to adapt to changing requirements in their work area. All of this speaks for an approximate matching of companies and specialists in the recruiting process, which affects the corporate culture.

Professionals Have The Freedom of Choice.

In certain areas, the shortage of skilled workers is related to the changed demands of people in the context of a change in society: today, young professionals have much greater freedom of choice than the generations before them. They are better financially secure and have a broader range of options for shaping their lives: which profession they choose, which employment model they choose, and how they generally make money.

Where work is a less coercive and more free choice, people’s expectations of the work they choose voluntarily (rather than out of necessity) increase. Everyday practical demands play a greater role than before. The value “work” competes with values ​​such as free time and family, which today often have a higher value. Therefore, the corresponding compatibility of work with other aspects of life is increasingly expected. At the same time, the meaning of work has changed: work is no longer a means to an end for earning money, i.e., simply earning a living, but is becoming a meaningful activity that is based on intrinsic motivation is chosen and which, as a basic condition, must above all offer one thing: quality of life. Where there is a shortage of applicants, the attractiveness of the working conditions must always be asked about.

Employers Become Applicants

Today it is no longer enough to create the requirements profile for a desired candidate and go out there with it – with the safe expectation that the right candidate will get in touch. Where professionals can freely choose their job, HR managers can no longer wait for applicants and select the best from a pool. The logic has been reversed: employers must become workforce applicants. New methods in human resources, such as active sourcing and employer branding, show that there is already an increased awareness in personnel management of the need for stronger, multidimensional self-marketing. Measures such as motivation workshops and team building also show that companies try to pay more attention to their employees.

However, such measures must not remain an end in themselves. A human resources department that wants to strategically focus on hiring people who are happy to work for the company and who want to act sustainably, i.e., want to guarantee long-term satisfaction and loyalty, must use targeted company applications and maintain relationships. Only then will the right specialists come and stay. To this day, companies and recruiters make sure that applicants match their job profiles. In the future, they will also have to ensure that the company fits the ideas and demands of the workforce. So this is not about another criterion an applicant must meet, but the other way around. Companies must face the critical evaluation of people – and be able to reflect and question themselves.

Values ​​And Lived Values

A company’s attractiveness is determined even less by classic (status) offers such as careers, salaries, and incentives. If you want to avoid disappointments in the recruiting process caused by a clash of different ideas, if you want to prevent dissatisfaction and lack of motivation or even burnout among your (future) employees and prevent high fluctuation, it becomes a duty to create a working environment in which people feel comfortable and in which they can experience their work as meaningful. Only then can companies succeed in attracting attention and arousing interest. Only then are people approachable and open to job offers. And only then do people feel comfortable in a company and enjoy working there with commitment.

Our lifestyle typology and our future personas based on it show the spectrum and the now great variety of what is important to people today: Today, values ​​play an important role when choosing an employer. People perceive their work as meaningful when they can work following their convictions in their everyday work – i.e., when they can act according to their values. Only then is the intrinsic motivation of the employees awakened. Only then do they feel emotionally involved and are willing to commit themselves personally to the company.
Values ​​cannot be written on the flag arbitrarily: Whether they are really valid or only valid on paper is shown very quickly by whether they (can) be lived or not. And since young professionals today have grown up in a world of advertising, the mechanisms they have long since seen through, they question and examine extremely critically – and quickly learn to distinguish whether values ​​are only dictated or asserted. Pure marketing, or whether they are that good, is anchored in the company so that it can (or can) be translated into behavior. HR managers should, therefore, also deal with their company’s values, look inwards and get an idea of ​​what the company offers – and for whom the company profile could be interesting. Values ​​and corporate culture are two sides of the same coin: The actual values ​​that prevail in a company only become apparent when the corporate culture is lived.