Employer reputation analysis and insights on how to attract next gen talent in the fast-service industry

Abstract

McDonald’s Corporation is the world’s biggest burger and fast-food restaurant chain. With the ongoing war for talent, it is becoming increasingly hard for McDonald’s to attract management talent for its franchise facilities. A shortage of available workforce on the labor market is accompanied by an increased need for more talent triggered by growth ambitions. Before the COVID 19 crisis, the labor market was facing historic low unemployment rates on the one hand, and a war for talent on the other hand caused by a growing business. On an industry level, new competitors are entering the Belgian IEO segment (Informal Eating Out segment) like KFC, Burger King, and Five Guys. Other industries including retail, food delivery, e-commerce are also the competitors in terms of workforce, often appearing more attractive due to the absence of night shifts, autonomy, and better balanced work schedules. From a company perspective, McDonald's is also experiencing a substantial growth per restaurant, combined with an extensive new store opening plan. The general aim of this project is to focus on the Managers’ hiring category, and gain insights on how to attract NextGen (i.e., Next Generation) talent for this category better by exploring the job needs and wants of this age group. The focal management question is how can McDonald’s optimize its efforts to attract NextGen talent that take up a management role in its franchises in Belgium in the coming 1 to 3 years? To answer the focal management question, McDonald’s wants to get a clear view of the job expectations of NextGen talent. What do millennials (1980- 96) and Gen Z (1997-2013) expect from future employers like McDonald’s? Furthermore, there is a need to obtain clarity on the perception of millennials and the Gen Z generation on (1) McDonald’s general image as an employer and (2) on the management jobs offered at its franchises. Research demonstrates a significant gap between the internal and external employer reputation of McDonald’s, so there is a need to have a better understanding of the root cause of this. McDonald’s is facing an incongruent situation where the external image is not as strong as the internal experiences. In a first qualitative research phase, to gain insights on how to tackle the problem, we conducted a literature review and 3 in-depth interviews with HRM and talent enablement Experts, NextGen Specialists, and McDonald’s internal experts. In a next quantitative research phase, a survey was executed with a sample of 99 respondents of which 55 respondents were targeted school audience and 54 were broader group of respondents. Next to that, a sample of 11 employees of McDonald’s was interviewed. In the data analysis phase various techniques were used (e.g., text mining, correlation establishment, persona (mis)match assessment,) to distil tangible insights from the output of this research. The main results showed a clear shift in the expectations of millennials compared to before. People want to work for a cause, want to have an impact and want to have time for their family and friends. Aspects like salary and work security were clearly not ranked in top positions anymore. The gap between external and internal employer reputation also shows that there is a clear lack of communication about what working at McDonald’s looks like. These findings made us think about several ways to improve the external employer branding of McDonald’s. These will be discussed in the following chapter.