Fierce competition for talents and asymmetric distribution of information are the
two main reasons that make employer branding necessary for knowledge intensive
companies. Why is this especially important for knowledge intensive companies?
These companies rely on an excellent base of human resources as the
employee is forming the perception of the client in terms of credibility, quality
and reputation. So how can you filter out and attract the best people? And are all
talents attracted by the same patterns? The idea of this research is, that as the
characteristics of employees cannot be determined in advance, it is important to
initiate a pre-selection by communicating a certain industry-image that functions
as a signal of expectations the company has. This signaling via external positioning
makes it easier for the prospect employee to select a job that fits to his/her
identity and reduces hopefully the number of applications the companies get
without decreasing the overall quality. The focus of this work lies on corporate
culture, its visibility in different processes and interactions and its importance in
the employee attraction process. The interrelations between involved constructs
like organizational identity, image and attraction are worked out and a framework
of external positioning is elaborated. The two participants on the market: high
potentials and management consulting companies are analyzed concerning their
needs and expectations from each other as employee and employer. The main
outcome of this work is three different possibilities for consultancies to position
themselves: efficiency, transfer of experience and creativity. They lead to different
communications strategies as they highlight different aspects of the work as a
consultant. Methodologically the interesting and demanding issue of this work is
the integration of organizational theory concerning organizational culture and
marketing theory regarding branding into one model.
The method used is reflexive and interpretative as it takes primary and secondary
data and the social constructions of the researcher into account and actively uses
it to construct something new.
The empirical data is ga...
