EMPLOYEE BRANDING AND RECRUITMENT

Employee Branding and Recruitment



Employee Branding and Recruitment

Introduction

There is no disputing the fact that it is a hot job market. In fact, for this past spring's college graduates, the job outlook was rosier than it had appeared in years. Increasingly companies and recruiters are wondering what they can do to ensure that they can attract large pools of the college job seekers they aspire to hire. Christopher J. Collins, in the School of Industrial and Labor Relations, recently undertook a research project titled, 'The Interactive Effects of Recruitment Practices and Product Awareness on Job Seekers' Employer Knowledge and Application Behaviors.' In short, he studied the effectiveness of different recruitment strategies in attracting job seekers. 

Previous research by Collins has shown that employer knowledge, the beliefs that job seekers hold about a company as a potential employer, strongly predict job seekers' interest in applying to the company and actual application behaviors. In particular, job seekers are most affected by their awareness of the company as an employer, their perceptions of how other students and faculty perceive the reputation of the company, and their beliefs regarding aspects of the job (e.g., pay, chances for development, interesting work). Companies must first create awareness of their company before they can influence job seekers' beliefs regarding reputation or job information. 

Because what an applicant knows about a company affects his or her behavior in the application process, it is important for recruiters to understand how to influence these beliefs. Collins first started with the assumption that job seekers knowledge and beliefs about a company are influenced by both recruitment related and nonrecruitment related sources of information. In terms of nonrecruitment sources of information, he hypothesized that students would be attracted to companies who had recognizable products or services. His prediction brings to mind a story told in HR Spectrum recently(Feldwick, 1991,, 21).

When the recruiting team for Diageo was struggling to attract students to their booth at job fairs and company information sessions, they replaced their Diageo banner with one for Guinness beer, one of the premium liquor company's brands, and they suddenly had plenty of visitors at campus recruiting events. Collins' findings were similar to those found anecdotally by Diageo. Based on data collected from 123 recruiting companies and 456 students, he found that job seekers were more aware of and more attracted to companies that had more visible products or services. Further, students applied to these companies at a higher rate than they did to companies that did not have recognizable products or services. Thus, companies with strong brands seem to have an advantage in attracting job seekers. Based on these findings, Collins then looked to explore if the success of different recruitment strategies depended on the level of job seekers' awareness of the company's products or services and the company's reputation. In particular, he was looking to identify those recruitment strategies that would be most useful for companies that lacked brand visibility and those strategies that would be most useful for those companies that had clearly visible products or services. 

There are two strategies employers can apply to influence job seekers. First, companies can implement lowinformation recruitment practices, recruitment sources that provide only general queues and positive images of the company. For example, companies use general recruitment advertisements (e.g., posters or billboards on web pages that contain positive images and the company brand or logo) and sponsorship activities (e.g., sponsoring campus events or donating money for naming rights). Collins hypothesized that these low-info practices have their greatest effect on applicant behaviors when company product awareness is lower. Second, companies can implement high-information recruitment practices, recruitment sources that contain details ...