Building Employer Brands: The Employee Perspective

Abstract: Employer branding, or the creation and communication of an identifiable identity as an employer, has become a buzzword that interests both practitioners and researchers. Employer branding is considered a key tool for attracting, developing, and retaining the best employees and is believed to be the answer to the so-called “war for talent”. The question of human capital is of the essence for all companies but is particularly prevalent for service organizations. For example, organizations in tourism and hospitality rely on their employees to deliver complex experiences, while balancing high customer expectations and resources available. Attracting and retaining the right frontline employees is crucial due to their unique role as brand ambassadors who deliver the brand promise in each customer encounter. At the same time, employers in tourism and hospitality have been struggling with a negative industry image and high employee turnover, which has intensified even more in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic.While employer branding has received a great deal of attention it still offers much research potential. Employer branding includes both current and potential employees, but most studies have focused on talent attraction rather than capturing perceptions of current employees. The majority of research has studied large companies with access to both expert knowledge and financial resources, and thus little is known about employer branding in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). In addition, it is only recently the concept of co-creation entered the employer branding vocabulary, referring to the role of employees as active agents or partners to the brand rather than a mere target market. Co-creation has been thoroughly researched in the tourism and hospitality sphere, lending itself as a suitable context for addressing the gap relating to employee co-creation of the employer brand. Thus, the overall research purpose is to investigate how employer brands are perceived and built by employees. This is done with a focus on the tourism and hospitality context.Based on the current gaps in the literature, the following research aims were developed: 1. To explore employer brand management in SMEs2. To explore the role of employees as both target group and co-creators of employer brand equity in the context of tourism and hospitality.3. To investigate employees’ perceptions of their employer’s attractiveness, together with intentions to stay and recommend in tourism and hospitality. Special attention is paid to the role of creativity and innovation. 4. To investigate which employer attributes are related to perceptions about the tourism and hospitality industry and the likelihood to stay. These aims were researched in four individual papers. To reach the overall purpose, a mixed methods approach was applied. The first two papers took a qualitative approach: the first paper used observational data, while the second used in-depth interviews. The two latter papers were quantitative in nature. This research contributes to two areas: the employer branding literature, as well as research on tourism and hospitality. In particular, it highlights employer branding as a co-creational practice and performance, where employees build the brand by participating in internal processes, representing the brand towards outsiders, and simply being part of the collective brand identity. The possibility to do innovative and creative work seems to be an important driver for staying with and recommending one’s current employer.  In terms of perceptions of work in tourism and hospitality, there are two levels to consider: the individual employer as well as the industry itself. The results emphasize the role of industry reputation and general industry attractiveness in retaining employees. This research also focuses on the roles and perspectives of current employees which has been lacking in the employer branding literature. The dissertation begins with defining the context of tourism and hospitality and current state of employer branding as an area, moving then to describing the identified gaps and landing in an overall research problem. The most relevant theories are discussed in the second chapter to lay the theoretical foundation together with a review on employer branding and employer brand equity. The second chapter also explains the concept of co-creation and the effects of the industry on the employer brand(ing) and concludes with a justification for the research aims. Chapter three explains the methodological choices for the dissertation and the individual papers and findings from the papers are described in chapter four. Finally, the fifth chapter presents the overall conclusions and implications for theory and practice.