Luxembourg has a shortage of skilled labour. Its main challenge is to recruit and retain talent from ever greater distances. By 2030, the country will need 300,000 new employees, a third of whom will be new arrivals. So we need to put strategies in place to recruit, but also and above all to retain employees. How are the grand duchy's main employers doing?  That was the subject of the Paperjam+Delano Business Club 10x6 conference on 24 January.

Recruitment in seven steps or seven days

Amazon Europe’s human resources director, , pointed out that when you place an order on their site, more than 50 different professions may be involved in the process right up to the delivery of your order. What counts for Amazon, more than recruitment, is retaining its talent. That’s why there are between five and seven interviews before they make an offer to candidates, Posty said. The aim is to make sure the company has found the right person, and then to give them the option of changing career within the company through a wide range of vertical and horizontal training programmes. Numerous opportunities are put in place to allow talent to develop. It’s not unusual at Amazon for blue-collar workers to rise to senior management positions.

Dussmann's HR marketing project manager, Christelle Noel, began her speech by giving the audience a mission: to find 40 security guards to hire. As the theme tune from the film “Mission Impossible” played in the background and the HR expert continued her speech, the difficulty of the assignments presented on the screen intensifies. What did she highlight? The often very tight deadlines: recruitment (of which there are many) often has to be completed in less than a week. How do you combine quantity and speed, especially when candidates apply without a standard covering letter or CV? To meet this challenge, an in-house application management tool has been set up to get to know the candidates as well as possible (where they live, when they can travel), as well as a unit that acts as a link between HR and onsite operations. Add to this the pre-validation of applications (out of just over 9,000 received per year) and on-the-job training, and the result is quite astonishing: 1,900 new employees in 2023.

Re-enchanting work

This is what , human resources director at BGL BNP Paribas, is proposing. After a rather telling observation: employees attach more importance to their private lives than to their professional lives. The ‘hustle culture’, which used to be synonymous with over-productivity and ultra-performance, has slowly but surely given way to the ‘break culture’, one of the main movements of which is ‘quiet quitting’, which consists of not doing too much at work. But what does re-enchanting work actually mean?

Firstly, create a working environment that makes staff want to be in the office and that provides something more than when they are teleworking. Cultivate the team spirit by creating--as is the case at BGL BNP Paribas--friendship or sports circles in which employees can share their passions. And then, of course, giving meaning back to work by playing on the usefulness, values and sense of fulfilment of the job for the employee himself, but also for society.

All the HR experts present agreed that knowing employees’ values, giving meaning to their jobs and establishing a culture are major factors in retaining talent.

The head of human resources at the Robert Schuman Hospitals Foundation, Karine Rollot, explained that the applause during covid quickly gave way to a definite lack of interest. Staff are now faced with increasing levels of incivility and aggression. The lack of recognition from the general public, combined with a loss of vocation and meaning in their work, and general fatigue, mean that the profession is no longer as attractive as it once was. Here again, training is emphasised at all levels. Training to manage conflicts, such as de-escalation, and to discover emerging professions while working.

Making friends with AI

It’s almost inevitable. How do we approach this digital transition? “Artificial intelligence excels in cognitive skills (data analysis), whereas humans will always be better at dealing with subjects that require emotional intelligence,” said Didier Lemeire, deputy head of business unit, HR & people management at Spuerkeess.

Collective power is required.  Humans and AI must move forward hand in hand, not replacing each other, but complementing each other in different tasks.

The final word

As , head of people & culture at KPMG Luxembourg, reminded the audience, HR people are almost superheroes. Three-quarters of them still feel passionate about their job. It’s a multi-skilled, wide-ranging job that needs to focus on new ways of working to recruit and retain more and more talent. To do this, it is vital to get to know employees, give meaning to their work and maintain a healthy work/life balance. This will be explored in July during the conference.

Originally published in French by and translated and edited for Delano