Holland's got talent? The relevance of employer branding in job advertisements for becoming n employer of choice

Organizations are in need of high quality employees in order to be able to fulfil the needs of its stakeholders and to be successful. Employer branding in recruitment might be a first step to attract high potential employees. In this paper we conducted two separate studies. First we analyzed whether and how employer branding is currently used in the recruitment practices in the Netherlands, by a content analysis of 114 job advertisements. Secondly we conducted an experiment in which a job advertisement with elements of employer branding was compared to an advertisement without employer branding.
The results show that employer branding hardly is used in recruitment communication in the Netherlands. It seems that in job advertisements rational and technical information about the job is dominant in job advertisements. From the experiment we learned that on various factors the advertisement with employer branding was preferred. In the discussion we will discuss the findings of our study and will give managerial implications of this.