The young, more climate-conscious generation is much less interested in working for oil company Shell than the rest of the working population. This is evident from research published on Wednesday by the Rotterdam Intelligence Group, which collects data about the labor market. While the oil company is still in third place for all people together, it only occupies fourteenth place on the list of dream employers among people in their thirties.
Last year, the agency asked a representative group of more than 16,000 people which companies or institutions they would most like to work for. The researchers made a distinction between theoretically and practically trained people, men and women, and age categories. For example, the tech sector is doing well with men and highly educated people, while practitioners often mention KLM. For women, employers in the healthcare sector, such as the GGD and GGZ, are high on the list of favorite employers.
The rise of Schiphol is striking. The airport climbed from 57th place to 20th in the ranking after the corona pandemic. The growth was seen in all age categories, including the more climate-conscious young people. Schiphol received negative media coverage as an employer on several occasions last year. Baggage personnel, for example, turned out to have performed too heavy work for years and the workload increased further due to a shortage of personnel. NS, where conductors complained last year about more intimidation and violence and irregular schedules, also rose from 12th to 8th place.
‘Bad PR is also PR’
“Bad PR is also PR”, director Geert-Jan Waasdorp of Intelligence Group explains the results. According to him, it has a positive effect if an employer, after negative publicity, shows that it is going to work with feedback and adopts a vulnerable attitude, “like Schiphol and the Tax and Customs Administration”. Companies such as KPN, PostNL and Heineken have therefore disappeared from the top of the preference lists in recent years, says Waasdorp.
The government remained the employer of choice for the fourth consecutive year, followed by the police. Chip manufacturer ASML (from 11 to 5) and ING (from 13 to 6) also established themselves in the top ten. In any case, the banking sector is doing well: Rabobank and ABN Amro are also among the top twenty companies.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of April 26, 2023.