Is Your Company Attractive to Top Talent?

by Knowledge@SMU, 29 January 2011

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topics:
Human Capital Management

tags:
job scope organisational personality perceptions pay prestige recruitment reputation

Job seekers form views of organisations through a variety of cues; some direct (e.g. job advertisements) and some indirect (e.g. word of mouth). Much like how consumer branding influences purchase decisions, the direct and indirect signals that shape employer brand perceptions and reputations will also likely influence the behaviour of job seekers.

Companies in competitive job markets like Asia ought to be clued in on factors such as organisational personality perceptions, which in the eyes of job seekers “convey important information about the organisation and what it may be like to work there,” say academics Gary J. Greguras and Jerel E. Slaughter.

Greguras is an associate professor of Organisational Behaviour & Human Resources at Singapore Management University’s Lee Kong Chian School of Business, while Slaughter is an associate professor of Management and Organizations at the University of Arizona. They co-wrote a paper entitled Initial Attraction to Organisations: The Influence of Trait Inferences.

Their hypothesis is that job candidates no longer examine just practical considerations (e.g., work hours, benefits), but also, whether the job can potentially complement their personal and social identities. The belief is that highly reputable organisations represent a more compelling promise to job seekers: e.g., “This is a reputable company to work for; this company probably has a reputation as being an excellent employer.”

Organisational traits

For their study, Greguras and Slaughter utilised a previously developed measure of organisational personality perceptions which suggests that organisational traits can be grouped into five key dimensions:

Boy Scout: Friendly, attentive to people, pleasant, family-oriented, cooperative, clean, honest
Innovativeness: Interesting, exciting, unique, creative, original
Dominance: Successful, popular, busy, active
Thrift: Low budget, low class, simple, sloppy, poor
Style: Stylish, fashionable, hip, trendy

Using these dimensions, the two professors launched a survey involving some 732 participants about a group of Fortune 100 companies. From the responses, they observed links between how organisations’ personalities were perceived and their corresponding attractiveness to potential job seekers.

Overall, the respondents were more attracted to organisations that rated highly on the Boy Scout, Innovativeness, Dominance, and Style dimensions, and they were less attracted to those that rated high on the 'thrift' dimension.

Perceptions of prestige

In marketing, branding serves an instrumental function, which highlights tangible benefits, as well as a symbolic one, which deals with the intangible. For instance, the instrumental value of an iPhone could be its intuitive interface and access to thousands of applications. Its symbolic value could lie in its ability to make users feel good – because the gadget allows them to express their personalities or social identities.

Some studies have drawn parallels between such seller-to-buyer propositions to that of the recruiter and job seeker.

“The process of joining and identifying with a new organisation can allow individuals to accommodate not only instrumental (e.g. income), but symbolic needs as well (e.g. increasing self-esteem),” Greguras and Slaughter write. “People seek to maintain a positive self-concept by joining organisations that they believe the public views favourably. When individuals work for an organisation that has a favourable reputation, they are proposed to ‘bask in the reflected glory’ of the company’s status."

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