Personal Quaterly 1/2022

8 SCHWERPUNKT _INTERVIEW PERSONALquarterly 01 / 22 PERSONALquarterly: Given the rise of social media, Third Party Employment Branding has received a great deal of attention from recruitment researchers and practitioners alike. Could you please clarify the concept and explain how employer reviews relate to it? What fascinates you about third party employment branding research? Greet van Hoye: With employer branding, companies are trying to create and communicate an attractive and distinctive image of themselves as an employer, for both potential applicants and current employees. They develop an employer value propositi- on and communicate this carefully crafted message through their job ads, job site, or social media pages. However, people do not only receive information that is controlled by the organi- zation, they also hear about employers from people they know, on the internet, or in the press. This company-independent information is likely to also affect their attraction to the or- ganization. That is, what third party employment branding refers to: communication generated by parties outside direct company control that affects organizations’ image as favorable or unfavorable employers. It is also this independence factor that fascinates me about third party employment branding research. Even though companies cannot directly control it, there is a lot of third party employment information available, especially on the internet, that is likely to affect their attrac- tiveness as employers. Therefore, it is intriguing to investigate and understand this phenomenon and give recommendations to practitioners on how to deal with it. Within third party employment branding, different types can be distinguished. For instance, the company-independent information can be provided by individuals such as employees or customers, or by an impersonal, formal entity such as media outlets or best employer competitions. Employer reviews fall under the personal sources of third party employment bran- ding. They refer to evaluations posted online by current or former employees or applicants about an organization as an employer that can consist of written text, video, and/or ra- tings. Such reviews can be placed on social media, but mostly appear on specific platforms that allow to post anonymous re- views about experiences with employment or selection, such as Glassdoor, Indeed, or specifically in Germany Kununu. Another Good and authentic internal employer branding will always remain most important Das Interview mit Prof. Dr. Greet van Hoye führte Rouven Kollitz related but broader concept is word-of-mouth. Whereas word- of-mouth can be provided by any personal source through any type of medium, employer reviews refer to electronic word-of- mouth provided by someone who has relevant experience with the organization and that stays available on the internet for others to read. PERSONALquarterly: What do we know about employer reviews and their effects on recruitment outcomes? Greet van Hoye: A lot of the research on the effects of employer reviews is based on experimental studies investigating reviews about fictitious firms. Here, we clearly see that reviews can affect potential applicants’ perceptions of and attraction to a company, both in a positive and a negative way. Very few stu- dies have looked at reviews about actual companies and the results suggest that the effects of reviews are less strong there, especially for well-known firms. In addition, some evidence suggests that potential applicants might be less attracted be- cause of a negative review, but this does not stop them from applying as they prefer to experience the company themselves or actively verify the content of the review. More research is needed that looks at actual reviews from existing companies and how they impact behavioral outcomes such as application decisions and job choice. Nonetheless, practitioner surveys suggest that more and more jobseekers are using employer reviews and that a negative review can decrease interest. So, companies should be aware of employer reviews about them and think about how to deal with these. PERSONALquarterly: Thinking of your own research on employer reviews, what were the most interesting findings? Were there any unexpected results? Greet van Hoye: When I started my own PhD research on word- of-mouth, it was almost inconceivable to operationalize word- of-mouth in an electronic way. In my first study, we even used videotapes of actors engaging in a face-to-face conversation about an employer. It is fascinating to see how quickly this has evolved with online word-of-mouth now being the most omnipresent form. We still need to investigate how this affects its impact. The power of word-of-mouth was often associated