Employer Branding: A Brand Equity‐based Literature Review and Research Agenda

• Date: 01 January 2018
• Author: Filip Lievens,Andranik Tumasjan,Isabell M. Welpe,Christian P. Theurer
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ijmr.12121
• Published date: 01 January 2018

International Journal of Management Reviews, Vol. 20, 155–179 (2018)

DOI: 10.1111/ijmr.12121

Employer Branding: A Brand

Equity-based Literature Review

and Research Agenda

Christian P. Theurer, Andranik Tumasjan, Isabell M. Welpe1and Filip Lievens2

Technische Universit ¨

at M¨

unchen, Chair for Strategy and Organization, TUM School of Management, Arcisstraße 21,

80333 Munich, Germany, 1Bavarian State Institute for Higher Education Research and Planning, Prinzregentenstraße

24, 80538 Munich, Germany, and 2Ghent University, Dept. Personnel Management and Work and Organizational

Psychology, Dunantlaan 2, 9000 Ghent, Belgium

Corresponding author email: christian.theurer@tum.de

Over the past two decades, scholarly interest in employer branding has strongly

increased. Simultaneously, however, employer branding research has developed into a

fragmented field with heterogeneous interpretations of the employer branding concept

and its scope, which has impeded further theoretical and empirical advancement. To

strengthen the foundation for future work, this paper takes a brand equity perspective

to review the extant literature and create an integrative model of employer branding.

Using an analytical approach, the authors identify 187 articles, which they integrate

along different employerbrand dimensions and branding strategies: (i) conceptual; (ii)

employer knowledge dimensions; (iii) employer branding activities and strategies. On

the basis of this review, the authors develop an employer branding value chain model

and derive future researchavenues as well as practical implications.

Introduction

“A brand is not built by accident but is the prod-

uct of carefully accomplishing – either explicitly or

implicitly – a series of logically linked steps with

consumers” (Keller 2011,p. 125).

In light of an ever increasing global talent shortage,

organizations are seeking comprehensive strategies

to attract and retain potential and current employees

(Guthridge et al. 2008; ManpowerGroup 2014). The

urgency of this situation is evidenced by a recent

global study indicating that, across more than 37,000

employers in 42 countries, over one-third reported

talent shortages in 2014 – the highest percentage in

seven years (ManpowerGroup 2014).

At the intersection of human resource manage-

ment (HRM) and brand marketing, employer brand-

ing (i.e. an approach to recruitment and retention

that ‘involves internally and externally promoting

a clear view of what makes a firm different and

desirable as an employer’; Lievens 2007, p. 51) has

been proposed as an effective organizational strategy

to differentiate from competitors and gain a com-

petitive advantage in the labor market (Collins and

Stevens 2002; Lievens and Highhouse 2003). Thus,

employer branding is seen as a prime approach for

responding to recruitment and retention challenges

(Martindale 2010).

The inherent multidisciplinary nature of employer

branding has led to a broad view of the phenomenon.

Simultaneously, it has engendered heterogeneous

conceptual and empirical approaches and directions

(Edwards 2010). Hence, we witness a dispersed

interpretation of constructs and applications in

the scholarly discourse around employer branding

without a unified understanding. More than ten years

ago, Cable and Turban (2001, p. 118) noted that

‘past recruitment research has been labeling similar

concepts by different names, and has been labeling

different concepts by the same name’. Unfortunately,

this is also true for employer branding research today.

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156 C.P. Theurer et al.

In particular, we observe that the field of employer

branding suffers from several shortcomings. First,

there is often little differentiation between discus-

sions about the employer brand (i.e. the identifier)

and the process of employer branding (i.e. the means

to build or modify brand equity; e.g. Berthon et al.

2005; Davies 2008; Moroko and Uncles 2008). Sec-

ond, different related terms and constructs such as

‘employer brand equity’ and ‘employer knowledge’,

‘employer image’ and ‘employmentimage’, or ‘inter-

nal’ and ‘employee branding’ are inconsistently de-

fined and applied (e.g. Edwards and Edwards 2013;

Ewing et al. 2002; King and Grace 2008; Lemmink

et al. 2003; Lievens and Slaughter 2016; Saleem and

Iglesias 2016). Third, employer branding research has

been conducted in several other fields (e.g. market-

ing) and in related research areas (e.g. organizational

attractiveness), making it difficultto distinguish those

studies from actual employer branding contributions

(Berthon et al. 2005; Chapman et al. 2005). Finally,

there is no consensus on the target group of employer

branding. Although most conceptualizations describe

a focus on potential and current employees (e.g. Lane

2016), the majority of empirical research focuses on

recruitment.

In summary, given this state of the literature, it

is pivotal to integrate extant theoretical and empir-

ical approaches and establish a clear view of what

comprises employer branding, to strengthen future

development of the field. This paper addresses this

need and contributes to the literature in four impor-

tant ways. First, it clarifies existing research on em-

ployer branding by distilling the constructs used and

showing their differences from and connections to re-

lated fields, and by (re)focusing employerbranding on

the guiding theoretical construct of marketing-based

brand equity theory. Second, this paper comprehen-

sively systematizes employer branding research by

identifying, summarizing and discussing the disci-

plines and sub-fields in employer branding. Third,

we summarize our insights into an integrative em-

ployer branding value chain model. Fourth, we iden-

tify and propose areas for future research to re-

fine and extend employer branding evidence and

theory.

Employer brand and employer

branding process

It is important to distinguish two terms in employer

branding research: ‘employer brand’ and ‘employer

branding process’. In a first attempt to examine syner-

gies between HRM and brand marketing, Ambler and

Barrow (1996, p. 8) describe the employer brand as

the ‘package of functional, economic and psycholog-

ical benefits provided by employment, and identified

with the employing company’. The specific associa-

tion of the employment offer with a firm is empha-

sized in a widely cited definition by Backhaus and

Tikoo (2004, p. 502), who state that ‘the employ-

ment brand highlights the unique aspects of the firm’s

employment offerings or environment [. . .] and is a

concept of the firm that differentiates it from its com-

petitors [ . . . ] by attracting, motivating, and retaining

the firm’s current and potential employees’. These

unique criteria of the employment offer,or the ‘pack-

age of reward features or employmentadvantages and

benefits offered to employees’,are often referred to as

the ‘employervalue proposition’ (Barrow and Mosley

2005; Edwards 2010, p. 7).

In contrast, ‘employer branding describes the pro-

cess of building an identifiable and unique employer

identity’ or, more specifically, ‘the promotion of a

unique and attractive image’ as an employer (Back-

haus 2004, p. 117; Backhaus and Tikoo 2004, p. 502).

In this process, marketing principles are applied to

manage organizations’ tangible and intangible em-

ployment offerings through, for example, communi-

cation campaigns ‘to raise awareness and strengthen

associations between the brand and desirable at-

tributes’ (Collins and Stevens 2002; Edwards 2010,

p. 1122).

Although the employer brand is, technically

speaking, merely an identifier (e.g. name, logo),

all brand-related information is actually stored and

summarized under the construct of ‘employer (brand)

knowledge’, consisting primarily of ‘employer famil-

iarity’, ‘employer image’ and ‘employer reputation’

(Cable and Turban 2001). The added value of

favorable employee response to employer knowledge

is generally expressed as ‘employer brand equity’

or ‘recruitment equity’ in a pre-employment context.

An often-investigated outcome of employer brand

equity is ‘organizational attractiveness’ (Lievens and

Highhouse 2003). Organizational attractiveness is

then regarded and evaluated from a more holistic

perspective, described by Collins and Kanar (2013,

p. 287) as ‘subjective evaluations of the attractive-

ness of a brand’ expressed through ‘surface brand

associations’.

For our review, it is essential to define, sort and un-

derstand unambiguously underlying associated em-

ployer brand(ing) constructs. Therefore, Table A1

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