THE IMPACT OF RECRUITMENT SOURCES ON BRAND IMAGE PERCEPTIONS AND ORGANIZATIONAL ATTRACTION: LEVERAGING ORGANIZATIONAL BRAND IMAGE PERCEPTIONS TO ENHANCE RECRUITMENT ATTRACTION

Abstract

In today’s competitive labor markets, successfully recruiting a large pool of skilled and qualified job applicants is a prime concern of many organizations. In Study 1, I focused on how organizations can successfully employ four traditional recruitment practices (sponsorships, job fair activities, word-of mouth endorsements and corporate advertisements) simultaneously to disseminate information about their positive recruitment brand images to job seekers to enhance organizational attraction. The results which supported all my hypotheses indicated that, communication of an organization’s brand images to job seekers through the simultaneous use of these four traditional recruitment practices can indeed influence job seekers’ positive perceptions of an organization and result in enhanced organizational attraction. In Study 2, which was built on findings in Study1, I theorized that social media may have become a prominent source of information for job seekers. In this study, I predicted that job seekers’ use of four social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, You Tube and LinkedIn) in job search will explain incremental variance in organizational attraction over the use of traditional recruitment methods. I also predicted that job seekers’ utilization of social media in job search will be positively related to organizational attraction through enhanced perceptions of instrumental and symbolic attributes. Surveys for both studies were posted on and data collected from Amazon Mechanical Turk. Results from the second study were mixed; but the results confirm findings from prior research, which showed that the instrumental-symbolic framework can be used to predict potential job seekers’ perceptions of organizational attractiveness. Overall, results in the two studies reveal that organizations can better enhance recruitment by using a combination of social media and traditional recruitment methods to attract potential job seekers.