“The Same Staff Can Be Enough”. Employers’ Resilience Strategies in Recruitment Decisions

Abstract

Studies on resilience have sprung from a need to understand the survival strategies of organizations when faced with the emergence of unexpected, potentially destructive and negative events in the lives of the organizations. This article, on the other hand, intends to highlight organizational resilience when confronted with unexpected positive events, seldom considered by such studies. This is the well-known macroeconomic phenomenon of the time lag between economic growth and labor demand at the moment that a regressive economic cycle is reversed. With which strategies do companies, in the face of such an event, transform a resilient attitude into real resilient behavior? Five strategies of organizational resilience are identified: Flexibility of working hours, staff re-allocation, minimization of turnover and absenteeism, job redesign, and reorganization of operations. A summary of results, managerial implications, contributions to studies and indications for future research conclude the article.