IRS 2019 EBSATT

Compared to large companies, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) struggle to recruit, particularly qualified candidates, which hinders their growth prospects. Their weak employer brand, compared to that of larger companies, partly explains this difficulty. In this context, a company’s corporate website serves as a candidate’s first point of contact with their potential employer and an essential source of information. It allows candidates to assess the company’s employer brand—that is, the way the company presents the functional, economic, and psychological benefits it promises its employees. The corporate website thus contributes to the company’s attractiveness. Despite growing interest in HR marketing, the interfaces between Marketing and Human Resources remain under-explored, and research on these topics needs to be expanded, particularly regarding the employer brand of SMEs. The concepts and tools of the marketing approach are, in fact, a lever for improving the candidate experience—one that is actionable for SMEs. This project proposes to apply a marketing concept—virtual hospitality, which conveys the employer brand identity—to the HR challenge of attracting candidates.

The EBSATT project focuses on two questions: What elements do SMEs use on their corporate websites to develop their employer brand identity? What are the effective strategies for building a strong employer brand identity for SMEs?

To answer these questions, we will conduct three studies:

• a multi-criteria content analysis of a representative sample of 100 institutional websites of representative SMEs, in order to propose a typology of employer brand communication practices;
• an experimental study measuring the effects of the type of brand-employer benefits promised by an SME (economic, functional, psychological, and related to the level of virtual hospitality) on candidates’ perceptions and behaviors;
• Finally, a discourse analysis of a sample of job seekers (lexical and thematic analyses), based on data collected using the verbal protocol method, in order to gain an in-depth understanding of the decision-making process involved in applying for a job.

People involved in the project: Christelle Martin Lacroux (project leader); Soffien Bataoui, Jessica Gérard, Agnès Helme Guizon.