Does employer branding beat head hunting? The potential of company culture to increase employer attractiveness

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate the combined effort of the HR Department and the Marketing and Communication Department to define and implement employer-branding strategies. To obtain the aim, qualitative research was designed to establish the relationship between employer attractiveness, organizational attractiveness and company culture, and to identify to what extent company culture can be communicated through employer branding. Therefore, firstly, the study clarifies the links between employer branding, employer attractiveness, company culture, and the boundaries of these concepts. It then examines how employer branding works concerning company culture attributes, and, finally, the paper draws some conclusions that will address practical implications in the form of employer brand management. The research design was based on qualitative research methods (in-depth interviews and focus groups) applied to stakeholders, employees from the IT industry, and IT companies’ representatives. Subsequently, the qualitative data were processed with Atlas.ti 8 that generated the results and the points under discussion. The data show that when recruiting strategies, respectively, employer-branding strategies are thought separately, as happens most of the time, their efficiency diminishes considerably, and the employer image does not have consistency and attractiveness. To conclude, this study highlights the following practical ideas: a)management teams must have a holistic approach of employer branding, organizational attractiveness, and company culture; b)employer branding, in order to become a useful tool for employees’ retention and recruitment, must be managed by both the HR Department and the Marketing and Communication Department within a coordinated and coherent strategy and c) for employer branding to be efficient, there is a need to leverage HR as a strategic partner and, as a result, employees will be developed into strategic assets of the company.