Do Inclusive Workplace Policies Foster Employer Attractiveness? Comparative Evidence From an Online Employer Review Platform

Abstract

Public sector employers increasingly promote inclusive workplaces, but the impact of such policies on employees’ perceptions of employer attractiveness has rarely been studied. A deeper understanding of how inclusive workplaces relate to employer attractiveness, and how this relationship differs between employment sectors, may inform recruitment policies and retention management. This study tackles this issue and provides a large-scale analysis of an online employer review platform, covering more than 16,000 Germany-based organizations as rated and recommended (or not) by more than 715,000 current and former employees. More specifically, it builds on person–organization fit theory and analyzes how employee referrals are associated with ratings in three dimensions of inclusive workplaces (i.e., inclusion of women, elderly, and disabled). The results show that inclusive workplaces are positively and significantly related to employer attractiveness, both on aggregate and across the three dimensions. The overall relationship is stronger in the case of public employers when compared with private employers, while there are no sector differences in the relationship when comparing public and nonprofit employers. The findings suggest that inclusive workplaces are advantageous in terms of employer attractiveness, not just for the beneficiaries of such policies, but even more so in the public sector.

What Drives the Attractiveness of Public and Private Employers? Comparative Evidence From an Online Employer Review Platform

“…In the following section, we present our study sample, introduce the measurements, and elaborate on the statistical procedure. As the analysis of user-generated data from an online review platform is novel to the field of PA (Luoma-aho et al, 2021;Satzger & Vogel, 2023), we present our reflections on the strengths and weaknesses of such data early on in this section, rather than reserving them for the limitations section. It is important to keep in mind both the benefits and the limitations of online reviews when interpreting the results.…”

“…A growing number of studies have used online employer reviews as a data source for empirical research in human resource management (e.g., Evertz et al, 2019; Könsgen et al, 2018; Saini & Jawahar, 2019), with first spill-overs to the field of PA (Luoma-aho et al, 2021; Satzger & Vogel, 2023). Such data offer considerable advantages: The platforms provide “big data” from a large number of users who evaluate employment policies and practices as implemented in real organizations.…”

“…As job seekers increasingly consult such platforms to gather first-hand information about potential employers (Melián-González & Bulchand-Gidumal, 2016; Schaarschmidt et al, 2021), scholarship in human resource management (HRM) has acknowledged online word-of-mouth (WOM) as an important factor in organizational attraction and job choice decisions (Evertz et al, 2019). To the best of our knowledge, we are among the first to use online employer reviews to inform public administration (PA) scholarship (Luoma-aho et al, 2021; Satzger & Vogel, 2023).…”

Inclusion in Public-Sector Workplaces: Charting a Path for Theory and Practice

“…Satzger and Vogel (2023) test the hypothesis of the “business case” for implementing inclusive practices. In the context that public-sector employers must compete for employees who have choice in working in the private and nonprofit sector, the findings suggest that inclusive practices are more than just a moral call to action.…”