Employer Branding and Recruitment Advertisement in the Digital Age How can employers utilize social media to attract the desired talent?

With the ongoing “war for talent” in contemporary society, more and more organizations start to realize the value of employer branding in attracting competent talent. Hiring and retaining talented employees is crucial to a firm’s competitive advantages. Companies, as a consequence, invest substantially in human resources management, in order to develop appealing employer branding through a variety of recruitment activities. In this study, we investigated the impact of online employer branding on jobseekers’ perceptions. More specifically, we studied the role of interactivity and information richness of the recruitment advertisement in affecting a company’s employer attractiveness and potential candidates’ application decision. An online experiment was conducted in a cross-country setting. The sample (n = 607) consists of 174 Koreans, 136 Chinese and 297 Americans. The results suggest that interactivity and information richness of the recruitment advertisement, as well as brand awareness and country of origin, play an important role in employer branding. In particular, a strong impact of brand awareness on perception and behavior of potential applicants was observed, which suggests the critical role of brand awareness in the context of employer branding. Also, high-informative messages were found to be more effective in creating a favorable perception of the employer with low brand awareness. In addition, the perceived favorability of the employer and intention to pursue employment among the Chinese respondents were found to be higher than that of the US respondents on the well-known US employer, which confirmed the existence of the country of origin effect in the context of employer branding. The results imply that for the employers with low brand familiarity, it is critical to establish corporate brand awareness among the target audiences prior to developing an employer brand. Further, given the differences observed in the participants across the countries, employers are recommended to develop localized recruitment strategies that take regional characteristics of job seekers into account. This implies that it is important for companies to acquire a good understanding of the local talent in terms of their interest and concern when seeking future employers.