Abstract
Given their challenges in attracting qualified workforce, small organizations must leverage their organizational attributes effectively. While existing literature has primarily examined organizational attributes’ perceived attractiveness from applicants’ perspectives, we adopt an employer-centric, resource-based configurational approach to understand how small firms combine their strengths and weaknesses to attract required qualified workforce. By focusing on a sample of 819 French small businesses (10–50 employees) surveyed and using fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA), we identified four distinct yet internally consistent attribute configurations that can achieve comparable levels of talent attraction. Our findings reveal that the presence of certain attributes can effectively compensate for the absence of others. These results demonstrate how resource-constrained organizations can develop competitive advantage in the labor market through strategic attribute combinations.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Number of pages | 25 |
| Journal | Journal of Small Business and Entrepreneurship |
| Early online date | 1 Nov 2025 |
| Publication status | E-pub ahead of print - 1 Nov 2025 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2025 Journal of the Canadian Council for Small Business and Entrepreneurship/Conseil Canadien de la PME et de l’entrepreneuriat
Keywords
- small organisations
- employer attributes
- employer attractiveness
- FsQCA
- Configuration
Access to Document
- Full-text PDF (accepted manuscript)
This is the accepted author manuscript (AAM) of the article which has been made Open Access under the University of Bristol's Scholarly Works Policy. The final published version (Version of Record) can be found on the publisher's website. The copyright of any third-party content, such as images, remains with the copyright holder.