Keywords: High-Performance Organizations, HPO, Organizational Attractiveness, Bottleneck Vacancies
Measuring Organizational Attractiveness
The war for talent has returned after the Covid pandemic. One way for organizations to win this war is by becoming more attractive than other organizations on the labor market. Previous research has shown that by becoming a high performance organization (HPO), an organization will be seen as ‘a winning team’ for which people like to work. This research evaluates whether organizational attractiveness can be measured by the objective ‘average bottleneck vacancies fulfillment time’ measurement, which measures the time between posting a vacancy on the job market and fulfilling that vacancy. In preparation for a webinar, organized by the Flemish Department of Employment on the attractiveness of organizations, registered respondents were send a survey with which they could indicate the high-performance level of their organization and how long it took for their organization to fulfill its bottleneck vacancies. The collected responses were statistically analyzed with the aim to evaluate whether or not there is a relationship between the level of high performance and time to fulfill its bottleneck vacancies variables. The research results show that there exists a linear and positive relationship between being an HPO and the time it takes for such a company to fulfill its bottleneck vacancies: increasing the high performance level of a Flemish for-profit company decreases the time it takes to fulfill its bottleneck vacancies.
1. Introduction
Nowadays every organization is competing on the (international) labor market for the acquisition and retention of the best talent (Al Badawy et al., 2013; Pingle and Kaur, 2019; Stewart Black and van Esch, 2021). The COVID-19 pandemic initially seemed to put a halt to this “war for talent” (McNulty, 2018), but this “war” returned quickly after the (initial) diminishing of the pandemic (Lund et al., 2021). This is not that surprising as organizations are experiencing two long-term trends that affect the availability of employees for organizations (Linthorst and de Waal, 2020). The first trend is the increasing “skills mismatch” which refers to the gap between the skills of the current employees and the skills needed for jobs in the future (Bakshi et al., 2017; Illanes et al., 2018; Whysall et al., 2020). The second trend is the shortage in the workforce, especially in the Western world, because of the aging of the population with many baby boomers retiring this decade (Alshathry et al., 2017; Kubicek and- Korunka, 2017; Rudolph et al., 2018). A logical consequence of these two megatrends is that, as there are not enough sufficiently qualified people available in the labor market, the only way for an individual organization to satisfy its labor needs is to be better than other organizations in enticing scarce available labor from the labor market or from those other organizations, by being more attractive (Lis, 2012). In the research
described in this article we develop an objective measurement with which the construct of
organizational attractiveness can be tracked.
The remainder of this article is structured as follows. Firstly, the construct of “organizational attractiveness” and possible ways to measure it are discussed. Then, in the next two sections the HPO framework is introduced, and its relation with organizational attractiveness is explained. Subsequently the bottleneck vacancies fulfillment time measurement, with which organizational attractiveness can be measured in an objective way, is discussed. This is followed by descriptions of the research approach and the research results. These research results are then analyzed and recommendations are provided. The article ends with a conclusion, the limitations of the research, and opportunities for future study…
2. Organizational Attractiveness
In recent years organizations have come to the realization that employer attractiveness in the eyes of potential employees is the key to the organizational capacity to attract and retain talents (Collins and Kanar, 2013). Organizations that are perceived as an attractive employer on the labor market will attract the best talent, as people want to work for organizations with a strong and positive…