Applicants’ likelihood to apply for jobs at professional service firms: The role of different career models

• Published date: 01 September 2018
• Author: Nina Katrin Hansen,Oliver Schnittka
• Date: 01 September 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/hrm.21878

HR SCIENCE FORUM

Applicants’likelihood to apply for jobs at professional service

firms: The role of different career models

Nina Katrin Hansen

1

| Oliver Schnittka

2

1

University of Bath, United Kingdom

2

University of Southern Denmark, Esbjerg,

Denmark

Correspondence

Nina Katrin Hansen, University of Bath,

School of Management, Claverton Down, BA2

7AY Bath, United Kingdom.

Email: n.k.hansen@bath.ac.uk

Against the backdrop of only a few empirical studies on the topic of up-or-out career models in

professional service firms (PSFs), we highlight the importance of an explicit applicant perspec-

tive on the topic of up-or-out and develop a quantitative approach to analyze the perception

and effects of up-or-out models in practice. Our empirical study is based on an online practi-

tioner survey as well as on a two-by-two between-subjects-experiment with law and manage-

ment students. The practitioner sample shows that the interviewed classic PSFs (law firms and

accounting firms) have predominantly implemented alternative career positions in favor of

up-or-out models while the interviewed Neo-PSFs (management consulting firms) show a more

balanced implementation of up-or-out models and extended career models. However, results

of our experimental applicant study reveal that the potential employee groups have different

preferences: Law students (and hence potential applicants of classic PSFs in the future) show a

higher likelihood to apply in connection with the up-or-out-model, whereas management stu-

dents (and hence potential applicants of Neo-PSFs in the future) show a higher likelihood to

apply in connection with the alternative career model.

KEYWORDS

applicants’perceptions, career models, job advertisements, likelihood to apply, organizational

attractiveness, professional service firms, up-or-out model

1|INTRODUCTION

The field of professional service firms (PSF) has gained a growing

importance in management research. Classic professional service

firms, such as law firms and accounting as well as Neo-PSFs such as

management consulting firms (von Nordenflycht, 2010), represent a

specific type of “knowledge-intensive firms”(Greenwood, Suddaby, &

McDougald, 2006), which can be characterized by a high knowledge

intensity, a low capital intensity, and, in the case of classic PSFs, a

professionalized workforce (von Nordenflycht, 2010). PSFs are

thereby often seen as exemplary for current organizational trends

such as the increasing employment of “knowledge workers”

(Greenwood, Li, Prakash, & Deephouse, 2005). Through their provi-

sion of professionalized services and expert knowledge, PSFs are

viewed as having a high impact on the economic activity of other

companies and non-profit organizations by facilitating their transac-

tions (Malhotra, Morris, & Smets, 2010, with reference to Sharma,

1997). This is especially true in recent times where organizations are

facing environmental changes and new organizational challenges

(e.g., Hansen, Güttel, & Swart, in press).

In the past decade, the field of PSFs itself has experienced a fun-

damental change as PSFs have increasingly become more managerial

to be able to adapt to new environmental challenges: The classic

organizational archetype of the “professional partnership,”where a

small group of professional partners are the owners and the managers

of a PSF and, at the same time, provide the professional services to

their clients, can no longer be seen as the dominant archetype of

PSFs (Brock, 2006). The professional partnership can rather be seen

as coexisting with a new emerging form—the “corporate global pro-

fessional network”(GPN) (Brock, 2006, p. 157)—to which a lot of

large PSFs have developed in order to become more “business like”

(Brock, 2006, p. 164).

Against the backdrop of this overall institutional development in

the field of PSFs, as well as changed job market structures and the

current “war for talent”(in which employers are competing for a lim-

ited pool of talented individuals), the traditional partner model, where

DOI: 10.1002/hrm.21878

Hum Resour Manage. 2018;57:1009–1022. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/hrm © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 1009