The Recruitment Dilemma : Recruitment as Both an Enabler and Constraint of Growth in High-Growth Firms

Sammanfattning

Abstract Background: High-growth firms exist across all industries and sizes, contributing disproportionately to job creation and economic development. Despite this, the internal processes shaping whether high growth can be sustained remain underexplored, particularly recruitment, which has received limited scholarly attention despite its central role in expansion. Purpose: Existing research offers an incomplete picture of how recruitment functions within high-growth firms. This study aims to fill that gap by exploring in what ways hiring and recruitment practices pose challenges during rapid expansion, and how these challenges are experienced and managed across different firm and industry contexts. Method: A qualitative, inductive approach, drawing on realist ontology and interpretivist epistemology was adopted. A comparative case study was conducted across six high-growth firms in six Swedish industries, using seven semi-structured interviews as the primary data source. Data was analysed thematically to identify patterns across cases. Conclusion: The study found that recruitment simultaneously acts as a driver and a constraint of growth, which this study terms the recruitment dilemma. This dilemma proved self-reinforcing in several cases, where weak onboarding structures, overloaded managers, and poor hiring conditions compounded each other over time. The severity varied depending on strategic choices made before growth pressure peaked: firms that invested proactively in human resource capacity and employer branding experienced recruitment as manageable, while those responding reactively found themselves persistently constrained.