What is your relationship to work?

Measuring the French people’s relationship to work over time is the ambition of the new barometer created by the Actual group and the EM Normandie management school. The first results identify three main families of behaviors, and this new reading grid could be useful to recruiters.

The relationship with work of the French measured over time, a new barometer has just been created by the Actual group and the EM Normandie management school.

franceinfo: Could the first results be useful to recruiters?

Sarah Lemoine: LRecruiters and candidates have difficulty understanding each other, and the situation has not improved since the Covid crisis. On the one hand, candidates feel mistreated, or asked for positions that do not suit them. On the other hand, recruiters complain of not finding the right skills, or of seeing people disappear in the middle of the recruitment process.

Yet, “There is no shortage of competent and available individuals, but they elude companies”, according to Jean Pralong, professor at EM Normandie. To better understand these behaviors, 200,000 workers were questioned on two structuring dimensions: their employability, that is to say the resources available to them in terms of skills and ability to adapt to the job market. And their confidence in the future.

What appears?

Three major families of assets are emerging. The disengaged, the stable and the forward-thinking. The first – 12% of those questioned – are resigned. They have lost motivation, confidence, skills. They are unemployed or work in very unskilled jobs. They need to be supported and trained to access employment.

The second family, the stables, represent the bulk of the troops. They have bac + 2, minimum and sufficiently employable to interest companies. Their moderate confidence in the future encourages them to look for a permanent contract.“But around age 39, on average, these assets shift into pessimism”. They become discouraged, self-eliminating and do not apply for fear of failure, which recruiters wrongly interpret as diva behavior.

The avant-garde, finally. It is a small minority of workers, so optimistic and sure of their skills, that they abandon employment to become entrepreneurs.

What lessons can we learn from this?

Faced with a shrinking natural pool of candidates, recruiters must ask themselves how to retain the avant-garde who secede. And, above all, change your outlook on the pessimists, who do not apply out of worry, and on the disengaged who need to be taken by the hand.

To encourage applications or reduce erratic behavior, we must make the recruitment process much more transparent, believes Jean Pralong, that is to say explaining who is doing what, who to contact, where the application is at, and why it is not. was not selected.