Employability and Industrial Mutations

8Recruiting in Innovative Activities: From the Impossible Search for a Match to the Construction of Employability

In this chapter, we look at the role played by organizations, and in particular companies, in developing employability. More specifically, it is a question of showing why and how a company in an innovative sector can be led to make an external workforce employable, in order to be able to recruit under good conditions and support its plan to launch and increase production.

The case studied is that of AERO, an establishment of a major group in the aeronautical field, created ex nihilo on a rural territory, without any particular industrial past in this field of activity, in order to produce elements in composite materials for last-generation aircraft engines. The proposed results are based on a long-term research work (3 years), including a doctoral work carried out within the framework of a CIFRE contract. The data collected is qualitative in nature, and comes from several complementary sources (observations, semi-directive interviews, video recordings).

The challenge for AERO is to succeed in a little more than two years in increasing production in order to meet an order book that is already full, while at the same time meeting the extremely demanding quality and safety standards of the aeronautical world. To achieve this, the HR department must recruit more than 200 people, the vast majority of whom will be in production, for activities that are new in terms of ...