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Author ORCID Identifier
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7027-1485
AccessType
Campus-Only Access for Five (5) Years
Document Type
dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Degree Program
Management
Year Degree Awarded
2019
Month Degree Awarded
September
First Advisor
Thomas Moliterno
Second Advisor
Steven Floyd
Third Advisor
Craig Wells
Fourth Advisor
Rory Eckardt
Subject Categories
Strategic Management Policy
Abstract
Human capital has been conceptualized to be a valuable strategic resource that can lead to sustained competitive advantage, and as such, employers are increasingly realizing the importance of hiring skilled and qualified employees. Thus, the competition for human capital has intensified over the years, and research on “employer branding” has become salient. In this dissertation, I focus on an organization’s “external” employer branding activities (EEBAs), which are recruitment messages used to attract job seekers. Prior research has explored applicant attraction by considering separately the amount of information and attribute content in recruitment messages. I integrate these two related but theoretically distinct research streams to develop a typology of EEBAs. I draw on the Resource Based View, Strategic Human Capital, Marketing, and Consumer and Social Psychology literature to build theory around, and test the effectiveness of these EEBAs. While the recruitment literature has studied the impact of employer branding on employer attractiveness and recruitment related outcomes, very little research has examined how firm-level characteristics may influence the effectiveness of an organization’s EEBAs. This is an important research question because there are good reasons to believe that the effectiveness of different employer branding strategies will likely not be the same across all organizations, and instead will depend on firm-level characteristics. Accordingly, I posit that corporate reputation, an important firm-level characteristics in the context of recruitment, will moderate the success of EEBAs in influencing potential employees’ job pursuit behavior. This research has important implications for the strategic human capital literature as well as practice, inasmuch that the correct use of EEBAs is likely to translate into the success of an organization’s recruitment efforts. Two experimental studies were conducted to test the hypotheses. The findings suggest that it is important for managers to strategically design EEBAs by considering the information amount and attribute content of recruitment messages, as well as the organization’s reputation.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.7275/3arq-9813
Recommended Citation
Choudhury, Muntakim, "Impact of Firm-Level Characteristics on External Employer Branding Activities" (2019). Doctoral Dissertations. 1711.
https://doi.org/10.7275/3arq-9813
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/1711
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.