The determinants of job choice by potential applicants in the food industry

The current and also future situation on the work market presents great challenges for the personnel marketing activities of the food producers. At the same time, in the companies the knowledge increasingly prevails, that it is primarily those who succeed in attracting particularly suitable and capable employees in the long term, who achieve economic success. It is predominantly medium sized enterprises in the food industry that have been shown to be particularly affected by this challenge, as they often do not have a pronounced image as an employer and therefore see themselves as being afflicted with a noticeably reduced employer attractiveness to potential applications. Based on this problem, the aim of this work is to systematically investigate the information and decision making behaviour of potential applicants to medium sized enterprises in the food industry. To this end, 671 people were surveyed, who were just about to complete their economics, agriculture, nutritional science or food technology degree. The underlying analysis was carried out using three sub models. In the first sub model the information behaviour of potential applicants is in the foreground, whereby it will be investigated for selected personnel marketing measures, whether the respondents on the one hand know and make use of this, and on the other hand to what extent they find each useful in their choice of employer. A further research question in this sub model was to what extent the above assessment criteria correlated with the socio-demographic and personality specific characteristics of the respondents, and whether the latter had an incremental validity compared to the former. Thereby, positive correlations were shown with the socio-demographic characteristics, particularly the predictors of subject, degree and university type. Furthermore, it was shown that the personality specific characteristics in the form of career orientation in addition to the socio-demographic predictors, could shed light on the variance in the assessment criteria of some marketing measures. However, the effect size of the underlying regression analyses was small, meaning that the correlations should be rated as low overall. The second sub model dealt with the research question - which applicant preferences are crucial for the initial decision to apply to a certain company. In accordance with the model of person organisation adjustment it is hereby postulated that the recruitment success of a company is significantly dependent on the compliance of its workplace characteristics with the preferences of the potential applicants. Thereby, using a total of five workplace characteristics with the help of a decompositional preference measurement procedure - the discrete choice analysis - it was investigated whether and to what extent this influenced choice of positions of potential applicants. The attributes selected here included two quality seals, where it is assumed, that they lead to a high likelihood of vacancies, due to their insecurity reducing signal effect. In addition, the career orientation of potential applicants is integrated into the estimation model, to analyse differential effects of the above workplace characteristics. In contrast to using direct surveying methods, it is shown that potential applicants attribute a great deal of importance to workplace safety. In contrast a performance related variable remuneration leads to lower benefits and consequently a lower likelihood of selecting vacancies. Furthermore, for individual workplace characteristics it can be proven that their influence on the likelihood of selection depends on the personality specific characteristics of potential applicants. The expected positive effects of quality seals however can only be confirmed in the case that the potential applicant does not know them. Otherwise, they do not have a significant effect and/or even have a negative effect on the selection decision of the respondents. The central objective of the third sub model is to identify suitable determinants of the application intent from the theoretical approaches of marketing science and psychological research, and analyse these using a causal model. With the causal model constructed here, it was possible to empirically confirm and further differentiate the contribution of selected predictors to clarifying the intent to apply to medium sized companies in the food industry. The highest predictive contribution to application intent was thereby clearly the perceived employer attractiveness. Furthermore, it was shown that the sector reputation of the food industry has a meaningful position within the causal model, whereby the effectiveness postulated here was conveyed partially or even completely through the sector knowledge. The results of these works clearly show that it is useful to observe the phenomenon of employer selection from interdisciplinary points of view, and targetedly use various existing clarification approaches, to drive forward theory formation in this area. Apart from its scientific contribution, the work also offers personnel officers in medium sized enterprises in the food industry starting points, to orientate future personnel marketing activities in a target group-specific way. Thereby, the knowledge obtained here from the individual sub models presents a significant basis for a meaningful performance, salary and communication policy