Research On Factors Affecting Employer Attractiveness

As employers pay attention on their human resource building, college students have become an important group of potential employees. How to establish a unique employer brand in this group will have a very significant impact on employers’talent strategy.The current employer brand research is still at a preliminary stage. Study focused on the value positioning of the employer brand, that is, what factors affect employer attractiveness, or employer brand. Since the research is just getting started, it has not yet formed a very mature research framework. Thus, one of the main contents of this study: take college students as the research object, to explore what factors affect employer attractiveness. This article draws on the brand image in the field of marketing. The factors affecting employer attractiveness are divided into functional and symbolic elements. Functional elements includes salaries and benefits, promotion of space, training programs, work can develop their individual strengths, work contribute to their own capacity, work is challenging, working with a sense of achievement, place of work, working environment, job stability, work and life balance. For symbolic elements, in addition to excluding a very few elements not suitable for the context of Chinese culture, this article follows most of contents of the Aaker (1997) Dimensions of Brand Personality. Besides, the latest study found that, the factors affecting employer attractiveness may vary or change between different groups. Thus, another important element of this study:Select a particular employer. Divide the college students into interns and external potential job seekers, Make a comparison between these two groups in order to discover the differences.The survey sample was selected Wrigley Confectionery (China) Co., Ltd. interns and external potential job seekers. And the way e-mail questionnaire to obtain172valid questionnaires, of which88interns,84external potential job seekers. By identification analysis of items, validity analysis, reliability analysis, correlation analysis, multiple regression analysis, this study concluded:In all groups, functional elements and symbolic elements are important factors affecting employer attractiveness; Symbolic elements have a greater impact on employer attractiveness among external potential job seekers compared to interns; Functional elements’ different factors have a different impact on employer attractiveness between different groups. In addition, the article also found that functional elements play more important roles on employer attractiveness in all groups compared to symbolic elements.