Refounding the pact with young talent with more salary, welfare and trust

At the debate on Who chooses who in the labour market, organised with Aidp at the Trento Festival of Economics, the levers for attracting and retaining people in both the public and private sector

by Cristina Casadei

23 May 2026

5' min read

Translated by AI

Versione italiana

Key points

The Psychological Pact Cracked
The value of relationships
Welfare and innovation lever
The attractiveness of the civil service
Quick integration makes the difference in M&A

5' min read

Translated by AI

Versione italiana

Greta Farina is 26 years old. She has been living in London for seven years. She chose King's college for her bachelor's degree and then moved to Cambridge for her master's. 'Things have changed a lot today with Brexit, but when I arrived, in 2019, I had public support to study at the best universities, I had the opportunity to do small part-time jobs to support myself and now I do research in a country where there is the analytical approach and support that research needs,' she says. He always thinks of Italia, 'it is my favourite country'.

If you ask her about return, however, no, that is a different story. There are many obstacles, the main ones, especially for a researcher like her, being 'precariousness and salary', as she told the Festival of Economics in Trento in which she wanted to participate by sending her application to the Call for ideas competition, the voices of tomorrow.

With her ideas, she was one of the winners and flew a week to Trento where she participated in the panel organised in collaboration with Aidp, entitled Chi sceglie chi nel mercato del lavoro (Who chooses who in the labour market), opened by Benedetta Dalbosco, president of the association of Trentino, Alto Adige and Sudtirol, who in the hall of the event at the Castello del Buonconsiglio wanted to explain how much this issue is felt today among personnel managers, in private companies as well as in the public sector with which the association collaborates.

The psychological pact cracked

The issue is very complex and the canonical tools are no longer sufficient to understand it. Paolo Iacci, scientific director of Aidp, president of Eca and lecturer at the State University of Milan, recalls that 'in April 2026, according to Unioncamere, the figures considered difficult to find were 44.6% of the total number of positions sought. However, reducing everything to a simple recruiting difficulty would be a mistake'. The truth, continues Iacci, is that 'the traditional psychological pact between worker and company has broken down. For decades the implicit exchange was clear: stability and belonging in exchange for loyalty and availability. Today, this balance has broken down and people are looking for meaning, quality of life, professional growth, while many companies continue to use cultural models of the past'.

The Value of Relationships

Professor Luca Solari, professor of business organisation at Milan's Università Statale and member of Aidp's scientific committee, considers the narrative of a labour market in which companies cannot find the right people because they lack the skills to be outdated. The numbers tell something more ambiguous: on the one hand there are the hard-to-find figures, on the other there is the phenomenon of over-educated workers that the new generations are no longer willing to accept. The result is that 'those who are better off, if they can, leave the country because it measures the investment they are making not only for the present, but for the future'. The psychological contract between companies and people, according to Solari, is broken on both sides. "More than 1.6 million under-35s have voluntarily resigned by 2024, 55% of young people say they want to leave within 2 years if they do not feel valued, candidate ghosting has increased by 400% in three years and it also affects companies symmetrically. We are facing an emptying of power on both fronts' and the way out 'is not economic, it is relational. The labour market is not a market, it is a relationship and needs time, freedom and trust, three resources that the Italia system struggles to offer'.

The lever of welfare and innovation

Adriana Valle, corporate affairs & communication director of JTI Italia points out that the company 'is going through a phase of profound evolution: our talents play an active role and we value them as leverage to drive the evolution. We are convinced that evolution, supported by significant investments in research and development to create a new generation of products in the most advanced way possible, stems from them'. This is also why the company has launched a welfare plan to attract and retain the best.

The attractiveness of the civil service

A problem of attracting and retaining people that affects the private sector as much as the public sector. Paolo Vicchiarello, head of the Civil Service Department at the Presidency of the Council of Ministers, observes that the public administration 'is facing two epochal challenges: the first is technological and digital in nature, with AI being the main lever for change; the second is generational and professional in nature, characterised by a significant turnover, more than 1 million people leaving over the next five years, and the need to attract and keep younger people in its ranks. These are intersecting challenges offering the opportunity to lead, and not just manage, the transformations taking place'. The attractiveness of the public administration is reflected in the figures of InPA, the single portal for selection and recruitment developed using PNRR resources, which has around 3.2 million members. The issue, if anything, is how much and how public administrations are able to retain new recruits. The issue, as we know, does not only concern the PA but the entire working world, which has to deal with expectations, needs, and a new way of conceiving work-life balance and organisational well-being'. The public sector, in some ways, has an extra edge, because 'young people identify in public work a decisive value aspect strongly connected to the institutional mission that they do not find in other areas of the private sector. This is the core of the generational challenge, but it is also a clear element for defining today's and tomorrow's policies in terms of investments and the development of an organisational culture capable of offering adequate spaces and innovative career paths in the public sector'. If the public administration is experiencing unprecedented mobility, both internally and externally, the same applies to private companies where, however, there is another issue to complicate matters.

Quick Integration Makes the Difference in M&A

The chosen company does not always retain the structure it had when it was chosen. Raffaella Bossi Fornarini, president of Passport and lecturer at GSoM, the business school of the Politecnico di Milano, recalls that 'in Italia at least one in two CEOs say that their company will be involved in a merger or acquisition and that the new company, born from the acquisition, has people who did not choose to work for the new entity and whom the acquirer would often never have hired. The risk is that while one is still deciding who to cut, those who should have been kept have already signed elsewhere and the value of the deal has gone with them. Experience has shown that the best way to multiply value is to act quickly, through structured and targeted systems, such as ours, which allows this to be done in 100 days, alongside the construction of a new corporate identity: a process that invariably concentrates energies, directs work and paves the way for growth'.