Head HR: How is our Employer Branding Strategy Coming Up?... Manager: Very Well, we are almost done with the Recruitment Brochure and are ready for the roll out!

           According to the American Marketing Association, a Brand is a name, term, symbol, etc. which is intended to identify a good/service of a particular seller and to differentiate them from its competitors (Schneider, 2003). The application of branding principles to Human Resource Management is termed as ‘Employer Branding’ (Backhaus & Tikoo, 2004). In the words of Sullivan (2004), Employer Branding is also defined as ‘a targeted long-term strategy to manage the perceptions of all the present stakeholders and to be stakeholders of a particular firm’.  Thereby the term employer branding suggests differentiation from its competitors. In a dynamic market environment, where there is abundance of job opportunities, what makes a firm different from the rest depends on its branding activities. To attract the top talent is the crux for the emergence of branding of an employer.  The activities for branding may again vary with respect to different employers owing to their uniqueness.

The objective of a branding activity by an employer is to create a perception or an image of himself in the minds of the employees and the prospective employees the way he wants, which in most cases the image conveyed is ‘best place to work’. Branding activity is more or less synonymous to providing information. The more the information about an employer in the market the more likely that prospective employees have a perception about that employer whether good or bad depending upon the kind of information flowing outside. This kind of an information flow via strategic activities or practices helps the current and prospective employees evaluate the organization. This information acts as signals used by the market to evaluate a firm whether good or bad to work for (Celani & Singh, 2011).

Gatewood, Gown and Gary (1993) in their article Corporate Image, Recruitment Image and Initial Job Choice Decisions have stated the antecedents which make up a corporate image and recruitment image. The antecedents which make up the corporate image have been provided below. The correlation mentioned below is the correlation coefficient of the antecedents to the corporate image.  Corporate Image and Recruitment Image brand the employer in a way which actually influences a prospective candidate’s initial job choice decision.   

Corporate Image	Correlation
Overall Familiarity with the organization	0.95
Knowing Someone who works for that organization	0.91
Using products and services produced by the organization	0.91
Having studied in class about the organization	0.90
Frequency of contact with the organization	0.88

Not only the above mentioned antecedents, but also there are other signals which the target audience look out for in the market in order to create a positive image in their minds which influences their job choice decision. Corporate Reputation too influences the prospective employee. Reputation is based on firm’s position relative to its competitors (Fombrun & Shanley, 1990). Reputation is again based on 3 correlates: economic performance (Market Signal), conformity to social norms (Institutional Signal), strategic postures (Strategy Signal). Gatewood, Gown and Gary (1993) in their article have also proved that branding exercise undertaken to construct a particular image in the minds of the consumers is not universal as it depends on a variety of antecedents which change from person to person depending on his choice and personality. This is the precise reason why Dell has 1.5 million advertisements telecasted to the entire world to cater to different personalities of people (Davenport & Harris).

Existing Literature on Initial Job Choice Decision reveals that corporate image, recruitment image and corporate reputation have the power to influence the job choice decisions (Gatewood, Gowan and Gary (1993); Fombrun & Shanley (1990)). Few strong antecedents which make up a corporate image and corporate reputation are mentioned above. The antecedents of recruitment image are

• 1.      Applicants Previous Knowledge about the process
• 2.      Frequency of contact with the firm
• 3.      Total information available in the recruitment advertisement

Among these 3 antecedents, total information available in the recruitment advertisement has a correlation coefficient of 0.96 with the recruitment image.           

Gatewood, Gowan & Gary (1993), even confirmed in their paper that corporate image has 32.3% influences on a person’s initial job choice whereas recruitment image has a strong 59.7% influence on a person’s initial job choice. This account to say that despite a particular employer not enjoying a good corporate image he can still attract good talent if the recruitment image is perceived to be good and procedural justice is maintained. If the procedural justice is maintained high during the process of recruitment, then the result is that even the candidates who are not selected regard the employer as quite high in image and values and the probability that the same candidate applying to the employer again at a later date is high (Walker, Bernerth & Tocher)

Role of Recruitment Brochure in Employer Branding 

A recruitment brochure is an ideal vehicle to provide information to the prospective candidates in a most fool-proof way. A recruitment brochure is the only mechanism which touches upon all the antecedents and components which make up employer branding. As mentioned earlier that the corporate image has 32.3% influences on a person’s initial job choice whereas Recruitment image has a strong 59.7% influence. Both the corporate image and the recruitment image together has an influence of 92% on the initial job choice decisions (R^2 value=0.92) (Gatewood et al, (1993)). Keeping this research finding as the core to our objective, recruitment brochure can provide all the information about the employer and the recruitment process if strategically designed. This brochure shall also serve as a tool to bridge the gap between the actual corporate image and the perceived image in the eyes of the prospective employees.

All the information provided in the brochure can be strategically designed keeping in mind the antecedents which make up corporate image, recruitment image and corporate reputation. Much of the information flowing into the market about a particular firm may not be controlled by the employer, but this strategic tool of recruitment brochure gives a clear picture of the process and practices followed in the firm to the talent from campuses which form a major hiring portion for many employers. This valuable information in the form of a brochure can help employers’ attract richer talent than the employers’ without a brochure due to the reasons that no information was available to evaluate the employer without the brochure. It is in this area that employers’ can strive for competitive advantage for attracting top talent by providing truthful information about the practices and culture at the firm.  

The future is going to witness more of branding activities by various firms, but the idea of recruitment brochure belongs to the first level of branding activity which many employers’ are still not competent with. Much more advancement in this field can produce the desired results with regard to attracting talent and branding the employer.

'Credits to Bharat Bhushan for helping me fish out and collate the existing literature for this article'