Why Organizations Systematically Engage in Employer Branding: A Conceptual Framework

‘An organization has two important key factors: its brand and its employees. Both are not imitable and basically unique’. This quote by one of the interviewees in our study described in this paper (the CEO of a well-known international organization) clearly statesF the importance of organizational focus being on employees in order to succeed in a complex and fast moving environment. In recent years employer branding has significantly grown in relevance. Especially practitioners research on the topic of employer branding has received increasing attention (e.g., Andreassen and Lanseng, 2010; Edwards, 2010). Next to an expanding number of practitioners literature, different studies in the field of employer branding have been conducted, like for example the Q12 Workplace Survey (Gallup). The major task of the employer brand is to attract and retain superior employees (Berthon et al., 2005). With regard to the frequently cited ‘war for talent’ (e.g., Ewing et al., 2002; Lievens and Highhouse, 2003; Moroko and Uncles, 2008) a strong employer brand is seen essential to become an ‘employer of choice’ to attract prospective and retain existing employees (Martin et al., 2005). Especially inexperienced job seekers may rely upon the employer’s brand image as making a comparison based on job and company attributes can be difficult for them and furthermore they are not familiar with all workplace attributes (Agrawal and Swaroop, 2007). Indeed not only inexperienced job seekers have to manage with incomplete information. In fact, all employees have to accept a certain amount of missing information due to the fact that the complete assessment of an employer is not possible prior to employment with the organization (Moroko and Uncles, 2008). A strong employer brand can help to attract prospective and retain existing employees. However, even though the benefits and the importance of branding and brand building in the labor market have been discussed and acknowledged by many authors (e.g., Agrawal and Swaroop, 2007; Andreassen and Lanseng, 2010; Collins and Stevens, 2002), little is known regarding the factors that drive employer branding activities in organizations. Hence this paper focuses on the following research question to extend the research area of employer branding and to identify insights which have not yet been empirically examined.