Human Resources Mar­ket­ing of Hid­den Cham­pi­ons in Ger­many

One term, which is dis­cussed repeat­ed­ly in many expert dis­cus­sions and is gen­er­al­ly dis­cussed in the labor mar­ket, is the lack of spe­cial­ists. Among oth­er things, it is traced back to the falling birth rate since the year 1985 and the there­of result­ing demo­graph­ic change. The decline of births and the shift of the age struc­tures have a great influ­ence on the amount and the struc­ture of employed per­sons in the labor mar­ket. This devel­op­ment means for the com­pa­nies that they have to posi­tion them­selves as an attrac­tive employ­er through appro­pri­ate human resources mar­ket­ing in order to gain new employ­ees and hold the exist­ing ones in the com­pa­ny. This is valid for com­pa­nies of every size. A spe­cial group of com­pa­nies are the so-called hid­den cham­pi­ons. Com­pa­nies that are count­ed to this cat­e­go­ry are char­ac­ter­ized by spe­cial prop­er­ties and attrib­ut­es, which makes them (glob­al­ly) very suc­cess­ful not sel­dom to glob­al lead­ers in their indus­try. At the same time hid­den cham­pi­ons are aside of the indus­try most­ly unknown. They com­bine the eco­nom­ic suc­cess of a glob­al cor­po­ra­tion with the size and the struc­tures of a medi­um-sized com­pa­ny. Obvi­ous­ly hid­den cham­pi­ons act dif­fer­ent­ly than oth­er small and medi­um-sized com­pa­nies. There­fore, the ques­tion is asked whether this is also applic­a­ble to their human resources mar­ket­ing, how hid­den cham­pi­ons design their human resources mar­ket­ing and which chal­lenges and chances are result­ing out of it.

Let us take a look at the terms “Human Resource Man­age­ment”, “Human Resources Mar­ket­ing” and “Hid­den Cham­pi­ons”: Human resource man­age­ment as cor­po­rate func­tion deals with all aspects which are in cor­re­la­tion with the fac­tor “human being”. There­by, it has passed sev­er­al stages of devel­op­ment. The human was brought more and more to the fore and the top­ics of human resource man­age­ment were becom­ing more var­ied. Human resources mar­ket­ing is a func­tion­al area of the human resource man­age­ment. The super­or­di­nate goal of the human resources mar­ket­ing is to cov­er the demand for per­son­nel. This is achieved by hold­ing exist­ing employ­ees in the com­pa­ny (inter­nal human resources mar­ket­ing) and gain new employ­ees (exter­nal human resource mar­ket­ing). There­by, a vari­ety of inter­nal and exter­nal human resource mar­ket­ing instru­ments for exam­ple appraisals inter­views, open house days or a col­lab­o­ra­tion with uni­ver­si­ties / uni­ver­si­ties of applied sci­ences are avail­able for the human resources mar­ket­ing.

And how could hid­den cham­pi­ons be defined? Most­ly hid­den cham­pi­ons are small and medi­um-sized com­pa­nies, which are count­ed to the three lead­ing com­pa­nies on the glob­al mar­ket or being mar­ket lead­ers on one con­ti­nent, achieved an annu­al turnover up to five bil­lion euros and hav­ing a low lev­el of aware­ness in pub­lic. Fur­ther attrib­ut­es of hid­den cham­pi­ons are that they are usu­al­ly fam­i­ly-run com­pa­nies and show a high inno­va­tion strength. In the rel­e­vant lit­er­a­ture this phe­nom­e­non was researched for the first time by Her­mann Simon who gave these group of com­pa­nies its name. There exist approx­i­mate­ly 1300 hid­den cham­pi­ons in Ger­many, which make a small pro­por­tion mea­sured at all small and medi­um-sized com­pa­nies, but ren­der a con­sid­er­able per­for­mance and that is the rea­son why they are described as “spear­head of the Ger­man econ­o­my”. But hid­den cham­pi­ons are no mir­a­cle com­pa­nies and there­fore they also faced some chal­lenges. For exam­ple due to the rea­son that hid­den cham­pi­ons are nor­mal­ly fam­i­ly-run, they could incur in sit­u­a­tions where fam­i­ly con­flicts affect the com­pa­ny. The research for suit­able employ­ees is a fur­ther chal­lenge. Rea­sons for this are the rur­al loca­tion (in many cas­es), the low lev­el of pub­lic aware­ness and the fact that due to the niche mar­ket, which hid­den cham­pi­ons often fill­ing out, they are seek­ing for cer­tain and spe­cial qual­i­fi­ca­tions which are rarely to find in the labor mar­ket. In pos­i­tive case chal­lenges could always be chances and are part­ly the rea­sons why the com­pa­ny has become what it is today.

With­in the frame­work of this arti­cle, we had access to an empir­i­cal study, which was car­ried out online and addressed com­pa­nies, which belong to the cat­e­go­ry of hid­den cham­pi­ons. There were 160 com­pa­nies con­tact­ed from which par­tic­i­pat­ed 39 at the study. The goal of the sur­vey was to fig­ure out how hid­den cham­pi­ons design their human resources mar­ket­ing in detail, how sat­is­fied they are with the results and which dif­fi­cul­ties they are faced. The first part of the sur­vey were gen­er­al ques­tions to find out if the com­pa­ny was actu­al a hid­den cham­pi­on. This was hold true for all par­tic­i­pants. More­over, the ran­dom sam­ple coin­cides with the real sit­u­a­tion in Ger­many for exam­ple with regard to the per­cent­age dis­tri­b­u­tion of the indus­tries and the loca­tions of hid­den cham­pi­ons. The remain­ing ques­tions aim for the human resource man­age­ment of the com­pa­nies in gen­er­al and in spe­cial for the human resources mar­ket­ing. All in all, the empir­i­cal study has shown that hid­den cham­pi­ons are an inter­est­ing and despite many par­al­lels a mul­ti­fac­eted group of com­pa­nies which future devel­op­ment could be observed curi­ous­ly. If one tracked the results of the sur­vey hid­den cham­pi­ons seems despite their low lev­el of aware­ness be able to claim them­selves in the so-called “war for tal­ent”. What is more, the results allow the con­clu­sion that they rec­og­nize trends like for exam­ple the increas­ing dig­i­ti­za­tion very ear­ly and ini­ti­ate the appro­pri­ate mea­sures. How­ev­er, this is not real­ly sur­pris­ing if one con­sid­er that the char­ac­ter­is­tic of hid­den cham­pi­ons to pre­pare them­selves again and again for new cir­cum­stances and to be often­times the pio­neer leads to their out­stand­ing suc­cess and will also secure it in future. The ques­tions occurs how hid­den cham­pi­ons will design their human resources mar­ket­ing in future, espe­cial­ly under con­sid­er­a­tion of devel­op­ments inde­pen­dent of the com­pa­ny like for exam­ple the increas­ing dig­i­ti­za­tion and glob­al­iza­tion and the fact that cur­rent­ly with the after the year 1980 born peo­ple, also the so-called “Gen­er­a­tion Y”, a new gen­er­a­tion with dif­fer­ent val­ues and ideas enters the labor mar­ket. Con­clud­ing you can say that hid­den cham­pi­ons are posi­tioned absolute­ly sat­is­fy­ing with their activ­i­ties in the field of human resources mar­ket­ing, these activ­i­ties have start­ed to bear fruit, but nev­er­the­less hid­den cham­pi­ons have always an eye to the future, do not rest on achieve­ments and face the chal­lenges of the cur­rent and future sit­u­a­tion in the labor mar­ket.