Employer Value Propositions for Different Target Groups and Organizational Types in the Public Sector: Theory and Evidence From Field Experiments

Abstract

Public employers struggle with recruiting talents and labor market competition. Research on the understudied topic of employer branding can help address this challenge. This study presents five large-scale, pre-registered field experiments ( n = 155,634) aimed at increasing the number of individuals initially interested in a job at a public employer. In social media ads, public sector values served as signaled employer value propositions (EVPs). The results show the importance of target groups and points of difference related to public employers’ organizational type. Significantly fewer women show interest in a job, and for a municipal administration, a fair pay EVP has a negative effect. This study enhances the understanding of potential recruits’ environment- and self-processing, bridges EVPs with public values theory, and provides a missing theoretical link between publicness and recruitment. It shows the importance of testing common assumptions about what works in recruitment in field studies with high external validity.

Facing the human capital crisis: A systematic review and research agenda on recruitment and selection in the public sector

“…Contrarily, a small but recent group of studies investigates attraction through actual recruit behavior. These field experiments focus on signaling different attributes in job ads (Keppeler & Papenfuß, 2021, 2022; Linos, 2018) and administrative burden in recruitment processes (Linos & Riesch, 2020). Studies related to recruitment practices are quite dispersed and explorative; they are mostly qualitative, with no measurement scales.…”

“…Research on these levels can be supported by drawing on theory and findings from traditional economic studies (see for example Ashraf et al, 2020; Van de Walle et al, 2015). In this context, it is also important to research the role of sector differences (Boye et al, 2022), often theorized within the publicness debate, and understand the extent to which public ownership, control, and funding affect hiring (Keppeler & Papenfuß, 2022). At the organizational level, blind spots related to the definitions and measures to examine attraction exist.…”

“…Finally, on the individual recruit level, the review shows a more pronounced understanding, which mainly relies on cross‐sectional survey designs that can suffer from endogeneity issues. More experiments can enhance a theoretical understanding of recruits' heuristics, self‐ and environment processing of sector‐specific signals (Keppeler & Papenfuß, 2022).…”

“…This can be illustrated based on the three overarching metatheories proposed by Ehrhart and Ziegert (2005). Public administration research has until now primarily been focused on "interactionist processing" theories (Keppeler & Papenfuß, 2022). These theories examine the interaction and resulting fit between individuals and a particular environment (e.g., PE fit theory).…”