1. INTRODUCTION:

In the world that is a plethora of job opportunities, Employer Branding is extremely crucial for an organization. Every organization today tries to attract new talent and at the same time retain its old gems. Employer branding speaks of an association’s endeavour to advance, both inside and outside the firm, an unmistakable perspective of what makes it diverse and alluring as a business.

Employer Branding is all about creating a strong relationship between the company/employer and its current as well as potential employees. It should help create value for the organization, individuals and to the society on the whole. This paper aims at studying the various factors associated with employer branding. In 1996, employer branding was a term introduced into the field of human resources and marketing. In the twenty years after it, many of the foundational concepts of employer branding have been researched. Scholarly interest in the topic has been steadily increasing over the years which is evident from the increase in the number of relevant articles being published. According to data available in Ebsco Discovery services, a total of 9094 article were published in academic journals, magazines, trade publications etc. in various languages like English, Spanish, German, Polish, Swedish and French. Of these 1990 were in academic journals. From 2012 to 2017 total of 1,126 articles are published in academic journals.

While some researchers focused on painting a broader picture of the factors influencing Employer Branding, some have focused of specific key factors. Investing on your current employee is far less expensive than hiring a new one. This is estimated to cost about one and-a-half years of a departing employee’s compensations(Jacobs, 2007). It is important for an organization to understand the expectations of young graduates and the organizational characteristics that influence them during their job hunt(Montgomery, 2011). Indeed attracting and holding ability are real difficulties for human assets administration which can be controlled through reasonable HRM hones(Merk and Buttgen, 2012). They likewise recommended that business ought to setup the employer brand that incorporates supportable HRM(Buttenberg, 2013). Numerous specialists have used the research findings of Berthon to distinguish the measurements of appeal of an employer brand. In the model, they considered distinctive esteems as components via, intrigue esteem, social esteem, financial esteem, improvement esteem and application esteem, and their effect on employer branding(Biswas and Suar, 2013). HR is the key for each association. In the time of relentless rivalry, it is basic for the associations to make an alternate character and hold their current ability and pull in the capable and conferred individuals for what’s to come. Keeping this point in thought, the present examination tries to audit the accessible writing in the field of employer branding with the goals to highlight the different elements that aide in building employer brand.

2. SYSTEMATIC LITERATURE REVIEW METHODOLOGY:

Medical field has been using systematic review to improve upon their research paper and researchers in management field have been trying to follow the same. Using the guidelines for systematic review, the scope of this review, the process of identification of relevant literature and the papers included in this review are presented by us.

Scope of the Review:

Form and content are used to identify the scope of review. For form we have used the academic journal articles, which are often known as certified knowledge and this excludes the articles which are not of academic nature, those consisting of magazine articles, viewpoints, interviews and editorials.We excluded articles that were in any other language except for English and also removed articles that were published before 5 years.

Identification of Relevant Literature:

We started with identification of literature review in July 2017. Initially we started searching through keywords like ‘employee satisfaction’, ‘workplace culture’, ‘employer’, ‘employee retention’, ‘career development’, ‘compensation and benefits’, ‘work life balance’, ‘job satisfaction’, ‘company culture and environment’ and ‘motivation’ in SCOPUS and Ebsco search. We chose these databases on basis of the quality of the content provided by them and the ease of access with which the relevant content was available. Initially when we started with the research we found 346 articles (see table 1 for detailed observation). The identification of documents was done by an author. The information that we collected included the title of the article, author(s), publication year, journal, type of document and database. Post which, we could eliminate 246 duplicates which provided us an initial sample of 100 articles. The abstract, discussion and conclusions sections were independently reviewed by the authors and it was found that 65 of them were not relevant to the research topic. After a joint discussion between the authors a total of 35 research papers were shortlisted which were most coherent to the selected research topic.

Results of the Systematic Literature Review:

The systematic literature review process led to the selection of a total of 35 relevant papers published during 2012 to 2017 for further methodological and thematic review. During the period from 2012 to 2017, a rise in interest in this area has been observed (Refer Graph 1)as employer branding was recognised as an important aspect of workplace environment both for exiting employees and new hires. The research in these 35 papers primarily involved unearthing various factors that influence employer branding.

Graph 1: Number of articles included in the review by year of publication

3. METHODOLOGICAL REVIEW:

The authors collaborated to find the predominant methodologies employed by researcers in these shortlisted relevant papers. The papers were divided amongst the authors and were studied to get an overview of the methodology used. Each author studied the relevant sections of the artices to extract excerpts describing the applied methods. This session led to categorization of articles into the following -

a) Qualitative research under which focus was on interviews and case studies

b) Quantitative research which focused primarily on surveys and

c) Mixed method comprising of above mentioned categories

d) Non-empirical research that focused on conceptual papers and reflective essays

Non-empirical research methods were used in 54.285%, which are 19 of the 35 reviewed articles, followed by qualitative research - 28.57% (10 articles), quantitative research - 11.428% (4 articles) and mixed- 5.714% (2 articles).

The relative newness of the topic can well be explained by the dominance of non-empirical and qualitative approaches. This is a clear reflection of the stages that a new discipline goes through. The usual path followed during research in a new area includes definitional issues, studies to explore, theoretical data, methods and measures.Therefore, the study on factors affecting employer branding consisted of conceptual papers, theory based discussions, models under proposition and qualitative scrutiny.

Thematic Review:

While working on the research important themes from various research papers were picked up and then the relevant keywords were picked up by the authors so that and all these keywords and abstract were first studied before going into a detailed inspection and reading the complete work of the authors to identify a some of the repetitive themes. After going through various research papers it was identified that following are the factors that have an effect on the employer branding and the most important factor that was work life balance which was the most discussed topic in 9 papers, which was followed by compensation and benefits management in 6 papers, then career development in 4 journals, job satisfaction in 8 papers and company culture and environment in 8 papers.

These research papers combined are a reflection of the co relation between various factors of human resource development and management and how it affects the employer branding. In various papers there have been differences of opinions which have been observed between various authors but the difference of various authors is a reflection of ongoing practices in various companies and debates will thus happen.

Graph 2: Number of articles on respective keywords

Work Life Balance:

During research work it was found that work life balance is a very important factor that influences the employees when they are asked to rate the employer and decide upon the branding of the employer. This plays a very important role in validating the fact that weather the company is worth the brand name that it has in the market when it comes to verifying the employer branding which in turn decides the attraction that it will post for the future employees and the picture that the company puts of itself in the market(Biswas S. a., 2007). The work life balance is an important factor that should be rated above average by the employees so that the employer brand is built up good in the market and paints a good image of the company. After going through relevant research paper what was identified was the fact that the employer which was better rated in this index had a low turnover rate and the employees complained less about the burnout factor. Companies which provide facilities like cricket grounds/swimming pools/tennis courts/recreational clubs and gym we rated above average by their employees when it came to assess them on the wok life balance scale. Services like laundry medical stores and supermarkets in the campus help in saving time after work which helps the employees spend more time with family rather than investing time in all these chores. When studying the factors effecting employer branding what was identified was that employees to a large extent identify with the values and expectations of the company, these factors were often identified as internal factors of the organization, however other than that they also associated with the outside factors and examples of these factors were religious affiliations, parental/caretaker roles etc and these factors were also known as true self of an employee.(Bhatt, Jain, and Prachii, 2015) work-life balance (Chlo´e Guillot-Soulez, 2013)For an employee to be satisfied it is very important that the inner and the true self factors are in sync with each other and in case these factors are not in sync with each other is when conflict arises and how well these conflicts regarding work life balance are resolved by the organization is one of the factors on which the employees decide and rate the employer branding.

Career Development:

During the course of the research what was found was that for most of the employees who were highly experienced they would rate a company much better if it had contributed significantly in their career development and helped them move ahead the ladder in terms of their professional growth(Miles, 2008). To develop an employer brand is not something that can be done without the help of top management and this will also require the use of strategic planning to help the employee figure out a career path for his profile. Employer brand is a continuous process and it benefits from team approach. This factor is greatly influenced by both functional and psychological factors and hence when approaching the career development for an employee it is important that these factors are also kept in mind since these are the factors that decide whether the employee is going to be influenced enough to rate the company as a good brand in the market (Mandhanya and Shah, 2010). This type of intervention from the management is what makes the employees feel valued and that it is not a one way communication channel with the organization. Career development is influenced by various factors like personal characteristics, financial resources etc and these factors should be kept in mind when planning a career progression for an employee as how much ever closely it is related to the personal expectation of the employee is what is going to decide the impact that the employer is going to have on the employee and hence the employer branding is going to be affected by the same.

Job Satisfaction:

In 1976 Lockes said that employee satisfaction is positive state about a job that comes either from appraisal or a positive job experience. When going through it was identified that the job satisfaction factor varies for different positions and is dependent also on the feature of a specific job. Some of these features were identified as work, co employees, the salary offered, and other organizational context factors. Many research papers identified that job satisfaction plays an important role in deciding the employee and employer performance. High level of communication with the co workers and involvement in decision making is what accounts as the two most important factors that decide and help and build a strong employer brand. When an employee is working for him to have that belongingness factor towards the organization it is dependent on trust and intrinsic rewards also which can increased through the following factors participation, team work, work contingents, job rotation, compensation benefits etc. It was suggested during the research that to build a strong and sustainable employer brand in the market it is important along with the activities and the execution of the activities, it is very important to have a proper communication channel with the target employees. When studying the employer branding it was found that different ways of communication had different impacts on the target audience which in turn had an impact on the job satisfaction picture that was painted for the organization by the employees. Hierarchical regressionanalysis showed that except for compensation, all the above mentioned practices have beenaccounted for unique variance when it comes to job satisfaction. (Buttenberg, 2013)However very fewresearch have been able to establish that there is a direct relationship between the Humanresources management policies of an organization and the job satisfaction score (App, Merk, and Buttgen, 2012). The outcome of their research was that the human resourcemanagement practices like safe work place practices, training and development, recruitmentand selection are positively associated with job satisfaction. The researchers have also shownsupport for the fact that job satisfaction is dependent on the balance between human resourcemanagement policies and organization behavior identified a positive relation between job training(Miles, 2008)and how this effects the job satisfaction and hence this is an indication that the HR practiceshave an impact on the job satisfaction.

Company Culture and Environment:

During our research it was found that a major factor affecting the image of the company in the eyes of its employees was the Company culture and environment (Hatch, 2001).Every employee in a company is concerned about the way he is treated at the workplace(Biswas and Suar, 2013). There are various factors that contribute to building a perception about the culture of an organization, to name a few, people-orientation, the autonomy enjoyed by the employee, the working conditions etc. Most of the research papers stressed on the point that the organizations that focused on attending to the problems and grievances of the employees and worked towards their welfare by implementing relevant policies addressing the same were able to not just retain their current employees, but also attract new ones. Providing health-care facilities and promoting productivity programs helps in lowering the absenteeism and has proved to boost the revenues generated per employee(Watson, 2010). This in turn has helped elevate the returns to shareholders and bring a good name to the company. Many researches also proposed that Rewards and recognition system plays an important role in boosting the morale of employees and attracting new ones as well. Every employee working hard towards his responsibility expects due recognition and when he gets it, it encourages him to perform better and stay satisfied with his job. Another important factor pointed out by most papers is job security. If an employee feels his job is safe, he feels relaxed and performs better. Also the stories about the kind of treatment that a worker laid-off by the company gets has a profound effect on the remaining employees and decides the bad-mouthing or boosting the image of the company in the eyes of a potential employee(Target Training International Ltd, 2010).

Compensation and Benefits:

There were mixed view amongst different researchers about the effect of compensation and benefits on the employer brand. Sivertzen in 2013 had used a 5 dimension scale to find the different factors that a company should focus on in order to build their branding strategy. Economic value formed one of the dimensions which basically pointed towards offering an attractive overall compensation package and said that monetary factor did not have much of an effect on deciding the employer brand of a company. On the contrary, another study revealed that if a company offered a package that was above the average compensation in market, it would keep the current employees satisfied and at the same time create a buzz about joining the company among other people in the industry(Franca and Pahor, 2012). As far as India is concerned, fat compensations always played a key role in deciding the desirability of a job at any company hence affecting the employer branding in a positive way.

4. LIMITATIONS:

In spite of the efforts made to understand the major factors affecting employer branding, there are a few minor ones which have not been discussed in this paper like leadership practices, employee communication, etc. This is because based on the data found in most of the research papers, these factors comparatively have been given less importance by most employees or aspirants as compared to the ones already discussed in the paper. But, studying them in detail might throw some light on some hidden reasons or factors that influence employer branding. Another limitation is that the importance of the selected factors is influence by the personal bias of the researchers. The research must be extended to cover more samples consisting of people belonging to different geographies, companies, financial backgrounds and social environments so that a broader picture about the factors affecting employer branding can be seen. Also if a person finds himself to be a perfect fit for the organization is a personal opinion and hence his perception of a particular company to be desirable to him cannot completely be taken as an opinion of the masses unless we have a large number of occurrences of similar choice patterns.

5. FUTURE RESEARCH:

During the course of the study we tried to identify factors affecting the concept of employer branding and also found a connecting thread between employer preferences on talent attributes and how to use employer branding as brand activation

The main question that started the study was who is responsible for employer branding? The CEO’s feel that this is their responsibility while HR feels that this is better covered under their job description and the will be able to do a proper justification when it comes to employer branding. What was identified as a result of this study was that there needs to be a proper collaboration between all divisions of the company for making the company an attractive brand for existing employees and the potential new ones also. Basically to implement this successfully there will be a closer need of cooperation between all the sectors of the company. While going through the course of this research what we identified was that for the next 5 years a great deal of focus will be on making sure that employer brand is built stronger everyday. However one major gap that was identified was that what matters the most to the employees and it seemed that all of them were majorly focussed on employee retention. It is also evident from the research that in the near future employer and consumer brands will be more closely connected which means that not only from within the various sub departments of the organisation there will also have to coordinate from stakeholders to make employer branding successful. Future research can be done to understand the connection between these factors.

6. CONCLUSION:

Given the immense competition between the companies to bag the crème de la crème from the industry, employer branding is surely a topic that enjoys the limelight in deciding the future workforce of a company and in turn decides its progress. We have, with use of limited resources, tried to highlight the concept of factors affecting employer branding by providing valuable insights. There was application of systematic research methodology under which we reviewed 35 articles and the same were categorized into 5 broad factors. The said factors were based on work life balance, compensation, career development, job satisfaction and company culture and environment. Each of these factors has been discussed in detail in the article.

As far as methodology is concerned, it was found by us that there was a lack of quantitative research methods whereas non-empirical research methods were in abundance. Hence, there is a need of working more on quantitative and theory based research methods. Moreover, as the interest of organizations is rapidly growing on the theme of our research, we felt that there is a need for improved methodologies that can capture the true essence of the topic.

After successful completion of the research, we believe that if a company focuses on the mentioned 5 factors and channelize their resources in revamping their employer brand accordingly, it will be successful in attracting more talent to their company.

7. REFERENCES:

1. App, S., Merk, J., and Buttgen, M. (2012). Employer Branding: Sustainable HRM as Competitive Advantage in the Market for High-Quality Employees. Management Revue, 262-278.

2. bhatt, n. j. (2015). Employment preferences of job applicants: unfolding employer branding determinants. Journal of Management Development.

3. Biswas, M., and Suar, D. (2013). Which Employees' Values Matter Most in the Creation of Employer Branding. Journal of Marketing Development and Competitiveness, 93-102.

4. Biswas, S. a. (2007). Psychological climate and individual performance in India: test of a mediated model. Employee Relations, Vol. 29 No. 6, pp. 664-676.

5. Buttenberg, K. (2013). The Impact of Employer Branding on Employee Performance. New Challenges of Economic and Business Development, 115-123.

6. Chlo´e Guillot-Soulez, S. S. (2013). Generation Y preferences for employer brand benefits. 13th EURAM Annual Conference.

7. Franca, V., and Pahor, M. (2012). The Strength of the Employer Brand: Influences and Implications for Recruiting. Journalof Marketing and Management.

8. Hatch, M. a. (2001). Are the strategic stars aligned for your corporate brand? Harvard Business Review, Vol. 79 No. 2, pp. 128-134.

9. Jacobs, K. (2007). The Rewards of Retention: Retaining Your Best and Your Brightest. PRSA (Public Relations Society of America).

10. Mandhanya, Y., and Shah, M. (2010). Employer Branding - A Tool For Talent Management. Global Management Review .

11. Miles, S. J. (2008). A Conceptualization of the Employee Branding Process. Journal of Relationship Marketing.

12. Montgomery, D. B., and A, R. C. (2011). Calibrating MBA Job Preferences for the 21st Century. Academy of Management Learning and Education, 9-26.

13. Target Training International Ltd. (2010). Employer branding: winning the post recession competition for talent. Retrieved November 15, 2011, from www.sayitcommunications.com: www.sayitcommunications.com/Portals/175357/docs/tti_white_paper_employer_branding.pdf

14. Amita Prajapati, Naresh K. Patel (2017) Empirical Study of Factors Affecting Employer Branding.Journal of Strategic Human Resource Management.

15. Neetu Jain, Prachi Bhatt, (2015) "Employment preferences of job applicants: unfolding employer branding determinants", Journal of Management Development, Vol. 34Issue: 6, pp.634-652.

16. Vatsa, Madhukar (2016).Leveraging Employer Branding for Organizational Success.Review of Management . Jun2016, Vol. 6 Issue 1/2, p9-13. 5p.

17. Watson, T. (2010). www.towerswatson.com. Retrieved June 22, 2011, from www.towerswatson.com/assets/pdf/648/TW_NA_2010_16703_SatW.pdf

Received on 18.12.2017 Modified on 11.02.2018

Asian Journal of Management. 2018; 9(1):785-790.

DOI: 10.5958/2321-5763.2018.00123.3

DATABASE	SCOPE AND SEARCH CRITERIA	DATE OF SEARCH	NUMBER OF ITEMS
EBSCOHOST	Abstract or author-supplied, scholarly (peer-reviewed) journals document type: article. language: English, articles from past 5 years	14-JULY-2017	184
SCOPUS	search: journals abstract, language: English articles from past 5 years	18-JULY-2017	162