Employer Branding for Consultancies

Fierce competition for talents and asymmetric distribution of information are the two main reasons that make employer branding necessary for knowledge intensive companies. Why is this especially important for knowledge intensive companies? These companies rely on an excellent base of human resources as the employee is forming the perception of the client in terms of credibility, quality and reputation. So how can you filter out and attract the best people? And are all talents attracted by the same patterns? The idea of this research is, that as the characteristics of employees cannot be determined in advance, it is important to initiate a pre-selection by communicating a certain industry-image that functions as a signal of expectations the company has. This signaling via external positioning makes it easier for the prospect employee to select a job that fits to his/her identity and reduces hopefully the number of applications the companies get without decreasing the overall quality. The focus of this work lies on corporate culture, its visibility in different processes and interactions and its importance in the employee attraction process. The interrelations between involved constructs like organizational identity, image and attraction are worked out and a framework of external positioning is elaborated. The two participants on the market: high potentials and management consulting companies are analyzed concerning their needs and expectations from each other as employee and employer. The main outcome of this work is three different possibilities for consultancies to position themselves: efficiency, transfer of experience and creativity. They lead to different communications strategies as they highlight different aspects of the work as a consultant. Methodologically the interesting and demanding issue of this work is the integration of organizational theory concerning organizational culture and marketing theory regarding branding into one model. The method used is reflexive and interpretative as it takes primary and secondary data and the social constructions of the researcher into account and actively uses it to construct something new. The empirical data is gathered by a written questionnaire and the sample was limited towards the biggest players in the consultancy industry namely A.T. Kearney, Booz Allen & Hamilton, McKinsey & Company, Boston Consulting Group and Roland Berger Strategy Consultants