Extending Employer Brand Theory: A Company’s Net Impact in Employer Attractiveness

Over the past decades, attracting the best talent has become every organization’s top interest. Demographical shifts in the workforce, global competition, and increasing attention to human resources as a competitive advantage have together given rise to employer branding. To win in the war for talent, companies have started to differentiate as an employer by formulating and communicating desirable employee value propositions. Employees, in turn, are seeking for purpose and impact in their work. The academic field of employer branding is surprisingly narrow, given the increasing interest towards the topic. Due to the lack of appropriate theories, academics have successfully applied consumer brand theories to employees. Further understanding is sought from recruitment literature: after all, both fields share the common interest towards talent attraction. Similarly, this paper draws its theoretical background by applying consumer branding theories to employees, and by borrowing insights from recruitment literature. However, the major contribution of this paper is on marketing literature. The purpose of this study is to extend the employer brand theory by researching whether a company’s net impact is one additional employer attractiveness (EmpAt) dimension, and thus could be deployed for building, or alternatively for destroying, employer brands. Here, net impact covers a company’s every action and its impact on the surrounding world. It is a wider concept than corporate social responsibility, and emphasizes the role of the core business, i.e. what products or services a company actually produces. The study builds on a theoretical framework that combines theories of employer brand equity, employer attractiveness and person-organization fit, from managerial and employee perspectives. The data were collected through an online questionnaire distributed on social media, resulting in 572 valid responses. The final sample nicely represents young, highly-educated Finnish professionals. The quantitative analysis consists of factor analysis and structural equation modeling (SEM) in order to discover EmpAt dimensions and relationships between them. Additionally, cluster analysis, t-test and analysis of variance (ANOVA) are carried out to understand the discovered dimensions in more detail. The results indicate that a company’s net impact forms one employer attractiveness dimension: the impact value. It includes the following four sub-dimensions: environment impact value, health impact value, society impact value and knowledge impact value. Further, the original five EmpAt dimensions are confirmed to exist with slight adjustments and new names. These dimensions are named community value, forerunner value, development value, fulfillment value and economic value. It is also proposed that all six EmpAt dimensions are not stand-alone concepts but rather dependent on each other. One possible structural equation model describing these dependencies is presented. Finally, seven employee profiles are described, and actionable managerial implications are suggested