Be Attractive and Succeed in the War for Talent? Antecedents and Consequences of Employer Images in Job Ads

In the last fall-winter period, 29 % of companies’ recruitment attempts were unsuccessful in Denmark. This is exemplary for a prevalent talent shortage and development towards employee markets worldwide, and for employers facing an increasingly difficult challenge for recruiting potential candidates successfully. A popular strategy towards improving recruitment success (e.g., number of accepted job offers) lies in branding the image of an attractive employer, and potentially, to even tailoring this image to different groups of applicants (i.e. differentiated employer image). Knowledge from this project will explain how much these branded employer images matter for organizations' recruitment success, and to what extent applicants vary in their perception and reaction to these branded images.

In the first part of the project, I will make use of two representative big data sets that contain job advertisements and rely on natural language processing. In the second one, online experiments on how job seekers react and perceive job ads will be conducted.