Hidden Champions: A Study on Recruiting Top-Level Staff in Rural Areas

Abstract

Top-level staff prefers to live in urban areas with perfect social infrastructure. This is a common problem for excellent companies (“hidden champions”) in rural areas: even if they can provide the services qualified applicants appreciate for daily living, they fail to attract them because important facts are not presented sufficiently in social media or on the corporate website. This is especially true for applicants with families. The contribution of this paper is four-fold: we provide an overview of the current state of online recruiting activities of hidden champions (1). Based on this corpus, we describe the applicant service gap for company information in rural communes (2). A study on user experience (UX) identifies the applicants’ wishes and needs, focusing on a family-oriented information system on living conditions in rural areas (3). Finally, we present the results of an online survey on the value of such information systems with more than 200 participants (4).