This chapter examines employers’ recruitment of staff via active labour market programmes (ALMPs) through the lens of corporate human resource (HR) strategy. It reviews the available evidence on the characteristics of employers engaged with ALMPs in England and highlights their concentration in low-waged sectors, such as retail, hospitality, social care and cleaning. The chapter draws on HR management theory to propose a strategic explanation for why employers in such sectors invest in the recruitment and retention of low-skill employees through engagement with ALMPs. The HR-based proposition is explored through a case study of a supermarket retailer’s engagement with the Work Programme, the UK’s flagship ALMP initiative from 2011 to 2017.

The chapter has three main sections. In the first section, the available and most up-to-date evidence of the characteristics of ALMP-engaged employers in England is analysed, highlighting the predominance of large employers in sectors characterized by low wages. The sensitivity of the data is discussed. In the second section, Lepak and Snell’s (1999) model of HR architecture is elaborated to propose a set of strategic recruitment and retention practices that may be expected to apply to entry-level employment via ALMPs. In the final section we explore our theoretical proposition through a short case study, which presents the experiences of recruiting staff via the Work Programme at ‘Midstore’, a supermarket retail chain. The case illustrates how engagement is driven by strategic imperatives and sustained by some local managers, yet also constrained by other local managers and various corporate and extraneous factors.

Who are the engaged employers?

The study of employer engagement is relatively new (Ingold and McGurk, this volume), so empirical research to date in this area is rather disparate, and there are few comprehensive explanations for why certain employers might engage. One important and long-standing generalization made in the relevant policy literature (see for example Snape, 1998; Hasluck, 2011), as well as in the related academic literature (van Gestel and Nyberg, 2009; Simms, 2017; van Berkel et al, 2017), is that engaged employers tend to be motivated by a combination of corporate social responsibility and business efficiency concerns.