Human Resource Management And Labour Market Challenges: The Evidence From Large Croatian Service Industry Companies

The aim of this paper was to explore how large Croatian companies engaged in service industry in their HRM practice deals with labour market challenges. The empirical research has been conducted in 2021 via specially designed questionnaire on the sample of 33 large Croatian companies from the service industry. The labour market challenges that have been explored were: aging population, shortage of workers, growing number of women at the labour market, labour mobility, process automation, workplace changes caused by COVID-19, employment diversity, characteristics of young people. The research results showed that the activities of companies in the field of human resource management related to certain influences from the labour market are very modest. The reasons for this could be twofold. The observed influences from the labour market do not have as many negative implications in practice as the statistics suggested, or the companies from the sample have some difficulties in anticipating and incorporating labour market influences into human resource management practice, and their strategic human resource management is not sufficiently developed. However, this conclusion should be taken with some reservations due to the research limitations. In order to verify it, it is necessary to conduct further research on this issue, especially qualitative research.