Employer branding as a tool to increase start ups’ attractiveness

Abstract

The thesis studied the employer branding process as a way to increase start-ups attractiveness for potential employees. Start-ups, unlike larger and more established corporations, face challenges when it comes to recruiting talented personnel. Employer branding concerns the different strategies that a company can employ to increase the employer’s attractiveness. Thus, to investigate how this would be possible in a start-up environment, few steps needed to be taken. First, the job attributes, later defined as employer brand attributes, which make the company attractive for the candidates, needed to be studied. Secondly, the behavioral characteristics of young and talented applicants, also called in the thesis entrepreneurial behaviors, were analyzed to identify their potential effects on employer brand attributes and employer’s attractiveness. The study involved a mixed method. First, a qualitative study was performed where 5 semi- structured interviews with start-ups managers or founders helped to understand the start-up employers’ perspective on the subject. From the content analysis of the interviews, five different employer brand attributes were found: financial package offered, responsibility functions, growth and learning opportunities, work environment, and serious games. As a next step, a quantitative study was employed where the (potential) employees’ perceptions were studied through an electronic questionnaire which collected 94 respondents among students and young professionals. Using conjoint analysis and regression analysis, the results revealed that the preference order for the attributes was: financial package offered (26,86%), growth and learning opportunities (24,12%), responsibility functions (19,20%), work environment (15,16%), and serious games (14,66%). At the same time, a positive relationship was found between responsibility functions (0.845, p<0.05) with innovative behavior. A negative correlation was instead verified between proactive behavior and responsibility functions (-0,506, p<0.05), and between risk-taking behavior and responsibility functions (-0.399, p<0.05) and growth opportunities (-0.362, p<0.05). Thus, the propositions advanced by this thesis for the academics was to continue the research on employer brand attributes and entrepreneurial behaviors enlarging the sample of the study to guarantee more generalizable results. For practitioners, especially for start-up employers, the qualitative and quantitative study revealed their weakness, mainly the financial package, which should be reinforced to improve the employer’s attractiveness. Moreover, a different strategy should be thought of for each of the employer brand attributes, such as growth opportunities, work environment, responsibility functions, and serious games, because all of them presented a positive relationship towards employers’ attractiveness.