Rethinking Employer Attractiveness: A Qualitative Exploration of Potential Employees’ Perception of Employer Attractiveness Attributes

Abstract

The importance of employees as the main asset for competitive advantage underscores the need for attracting and keeping skilled employees for the benefit of the organizations’ performance. This turns the focus of the employer to branding and employer attractiveness. What constitutes an attractive employer brand is, however, not clear based on the existing literature. The current study’s purpose was to re-examine the attributes of employer attractiveness, given issues with the dominant approaches, by asking the following research question: What are the distinctive and generally relevant dimensions of employer attractiveness? Importantly, the study adopted a qualitative approach by using interviews with 20 graduating students from Canada and Norway as the main source of data, as the method enables exploration of emerging attributes. The findings partly support the existing literature in terms of important attributes of an employer as perceived by prospective employees. Nevertheless, the current study proposes potential modifications to previously identified attributes and suggests additional attributes of importance. Taken together, the results point to some easily communicated image aspects, such as, development challenges, application of educational skills, and advancement opportunities. However, recruiters will have to be creative to convey an attractive employer brand image for other aspects such as career advancement, organizational values, job security, work–life balance, organization and procedures, job characteristics, company size, and location.