Employers’ Recruitment Strategies and Decisions. First Findings from Employer Interviews: Country Report Austria

Task 4.1 of the CUPESSE project is about understanding the importance of hard skills and soft skills for employers’ recruitment decisions – especially when hiring young employees and apprentices aged 18-35. In this aim, qualitative interviews (i.e., expert interviews with those responsible for hiring new personnel in small, medium-sized and large firms and enterprises) have been carried out to better understand which and to what extent hard and soft skills matter for employers’ recruitment strategies and decisions. The lead partner of this task – the University of Heidelberg (UHEI) – has developed the interview guidelines and carried out eleven interviews in Germany. In Austria, 22 interviews have been carried out in the time between December 2015 and April 2016 — using a slightly adapted version of the interview guidelines prepared by UHEI (see section 7 for interview guidelines). The interviews have been carried out by master students1 at the University of Vienna, taking a course in ‘Employment Relations and Human Resources Management’ given by Nadia
Steiber. The interviews were carried out in the Eastern part of Austria, in Vienna and Lower Austria.