Building with equality : A study of recruitment communication targeted at women in a male-dominated industry

The demand for labour force in the European building industry has increased in recent years due to the constant migrations and the need to provide housing, schools and hospitals to accommodate this growing population. Due to this scenario and to governmental policies that were created to supply this need, Swedish building companies want to recruit more female employees in particular. The purpose of this case study is to investigate whether, and if so how, the building company NCC uses its external communication to strategically attract more women to the industry. Our research was of a qualitative nature. We analysed, with the help of a Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis approach, recruitment materials and job advertisements published on the company’s homepage, in order to demonstrate how men and women are represented in NCC’s recruitment communication and in which way the company communicates specifically to women. We have also analysed which aspects of the company’s recruitment communication were appealing to women, through focus group interviews made with female engineering students. As theoretical ground for this case study we have chosen previous research and literature in the fields of organizational communication, employer branding, decoding in communication processes, gender studies, stereotyping and gender aware recruitment. The findings in this study show that both men and women are represented in NCC’s recruitment communication, but that a bigger focus is placed on the visual representation of women. NCC strategically aims at attracting women both in the way female workers are visually portrayed on the homepage but even in the wording found in the company’s recruitment texts and job advertisements. This targeted communication does not reach its full potential in terms of attractiveness to women though, perhaps due to the rather cosmetic visual representation of the company’s work environment, as well as the lack of personal connection that is made between the portrayed employees and the potential job candidates