The role of affective states in potential applicants’ evaluations of employer attractiveness

Abstract

What role do emotions play as a job seeker eyes up a potential employer? Our contribution to research into employer attractiveness explores the role that affective states play in potential applicants’ subjective perceptions of companies’ employer attractiveness in the early phase of job seeking. We adopt a concurrent verbalization approach to inquire into qualified potential applicants’ processes of interpreting employer branding material. Based on these data, we provide insights into the neglected role of emotions in research on potential applicants’ assessments of the appeal of an organization. The findings from a multistep qualitative data analysis produce the following four propositions: (1) strong emotions influence the outcome of the opinion-making process; (2) negative emotions play a crucial role in potential applicants’ evaluations of employer attractiveness; (3) some contents of employer information elicit negative emotions, whereas their complementary counterparts do not elicit positive affective reactions; and (4) expectations towards an employer and comparisons among employers influence potential applicants’ sentiments about individual employers.

Keywords

early recruitment stage emotions employer attractiveness employer branding qualitative research (concurrent verbalization)

Introduction

Emotions are generally considered to play a significant part in human decision-making (Elster, 2010; Prinz, 2004), and some authors even describe reason as being ‘the slave of the passions’ (Hume, 1896: 415). Research on the perception of branded products and corporate brands has revealed that both positive and negative emotions play an important role in the development of the consumer’s attitude towards brands and associated consumer behaviour (Bagozzi et al., 1999; Ding and Tseng, 2015; Karahanolu and Sener, 2009; Romani et al., 2009, 2012). The relevance of affect-based deterrent effects has also been acknowledged in research on later stages of the recruitment process (e.g. Steiner and Gilliland (1996), and Hoang et al. (2012), in the study of reactions to selection methods). Nonetheless, and although feelings have also been identified as crucial in research on information processing (Schwarz and Clore, 2003), hardly any studies have investigated the role of affect in the subjective assessment of employer attractiveness during the recruiting phase of initial applicant attraction (Rampl et al., 2016; Stevens and Seo, 2014). This is surprising since perceived organizational attractiveness is defined as ‘an attitude or expressed general positive affect toward an organization, toward viewing the organization as a desirable entity with which to initiate some relationship’ (Aiman-Smith et al., 2001: 221). In the present article, we address this void in research on the role of emotions in the process of initial applicant attraction by presenting an exploratory study that investigates the role of positive and negative emotions in job seekers’ interpretations of employer branding material in the early stage of recruitment. The purpose of initial applicant attraction as the first stage of the recruitment process is to attract highly qualified applicants to apply for (future) job openings (Barber, 1998). Since the relevance and effectiveness of later recruitment activities depend on the successful creation of positive employer images in this early stage, it can be considered to be pivotal (Walker and Hinojosa, 2014). Our study therefore addresses the following research question: What role do affective states play in potential applicants’ evaluations of companies’ employer attractiveness in the early phase of job seeking?

By providing an analysis of both positive and negative affective states in applicants’ subjective evaluations of employer attractiveness, our study contributes to research on employer branding and employer attractiveness in two ways: First, the study extends empirical knowledge on the development of job seekers’ assessments of employer attractiveness. On the one hand, this is achieved by embracing the previously neglected role of affective responses in the perception and interpretation of employer information in the recruiting phase of initial applicant attraction (Stevens and Seo, 2014). On the other hand, our study adds to the scarce knowledge available on the development process of attractiveness perceptions (Walker et al., 2011: 165). Specifically, the use of real employers allows us to gain insights into potential applicants’ interpretations that evade the control of employer brand management. In this respect, our study joins emerging research on the active role of addressees of employer branding in the process of recruiting (Russell and Brannan, 2016). Second, the findings presented in this article provide a conceptual foundation for more empirical studies in this vein and thus offer opportunities for interesting additions to existing research on the perception of employer attractiveness in the first phase of recruitment.

The article is structured as follows: We present a brief review of empirical research on the topic of employer attractiveness, with a particular focus on organizational attraction in the early stage of the recruitment process. Subsequently, we compare this status quo to the literature on similar opinion-making processes from empirical contexts outside of attracting applicants – including product and corporate branding, and from later stages of the recruitment process. We then describe the qualitative study design employed, and outline the study findings, which particularly highlight the relevance of negative and high-arousal emotions, as well as of expectations and comparisons, in potential applicants’ assessments of an employer’s attractiveness. Finally, in the discussion section, we put forward four inductively derived propositions concerning the role of affirming and aversive emotional reactions in job seekers’ engagement with employer brand material and indicate possible pathways for future research.

Theoretical background

Empirical research on employer attractiveness in the first phase of the recruitment process

The initial phase of recruitment (i.e. applicant attraction) has ‘the primary purpose of identifying and attracting potential employees’ (Barber, 1998: 5). This task is regarded as crucial in recruiting research (Yu and Cable, 2013), because a job seekers’ intention to apply is connected to their perception and interpretation of organizations’ early recruitment-related activities (Collins and Stevens, 2002). External employer branding aims at attracting potential employees by creating, implementing and communicating a convincing employer value proposition to potential applicants (Edwards, 2010; Van Hoye et al., 2013). Given specific labour market conditions, such as concerns about labour shortages and increased competition for quality employees (App et al., 2012; Beechler and Woodward, 2009; Van Hoye, 2008), applicant attraction is argued to be more important than ever (Saks, 2005). Organizational attractiveness literature provides a rich body of empirical research on applicant attraction. It ranges from studies dealing with dimensions of employer attractiveness (Ehrhart and Ziegert, 2005) and investigating media richness and media credibility to studies concerning person–organization fit (Lievens and Slaughter, 2016), including studies from the perspective of cross-cultural studies (e.g. Baum and Kabst, 2013). Immanent to the body of research on applicant attraction is a focus on the measurement of prehire outcomes (Saks, 2014). In contrast to the vast extent of research focusing on outcome measurements, processual aspects concerning employer brand encounters and job seekers’ opinion-making processes have been given little attention, resulting in a lack of insight regarding questions of how potential applicants’ perceptions of employer knowledge and employer attractiveness develop (Walker et al., 2011).

Theurer et al. (2018) suggest that the applicant/employee mind-set is a well-researched part of employer branding studies. However, their extensive literature review on employer branding also indicates that the cognitive and behavioural dimension (i.e. what job seekers think and do) is given privileged attention over the affective dimension (i.e. what job seekers feel). Affect is a relevant phenomenon during applicants’ opinion-making processes but is not necessarily apparent in their perceptual outcomes, and thus is almost absent from research on early applicant attraction (Stevens and Seo, 2014). This absence seems surprising, given that applicant attraction has been likened to the social process of persuasion (Walker and Hinojosa, 2014), a comparison that highlights both the processual character of the development of applicant attraction and the importance of affective qualities in this process. Überschaer et al.’s (2016) study illustrates this point by showing that attractive employer information initiates the necessary arousal for actual and prospective job seekers’ motivation to process employer information. It also has been shown through a functional magnetic resonance study conducted by Rampl et al. (2016) that potential applicants’ evaluation of employer brands is a process in which the emotional areas of the brain are more involved than the areas associated with cognitive reasoning. Furthermore, the eventual outcome of organizational familiarization processes – potential applicants’ weak to strong like or dislike of an employer – refers to people’s feelings more than to their beliefs about the respective organization (for the general argument about the emotional character of attraction decisions, see Clore and Gormly, 1974). In their review of the literature on emotions in the context of a job search, Stevens and Seo (2014: 129) emphasize that ‘an emotion-based reasoning account warrants additional study’ and note that this line of inquiry could provide theoretical explanations for certain empirical findings from recruitment research. For instance, negative feelings that are experienced in response to continued uncertainty following a job interview might help explain the increased likelihood that job seekers will reject a job offer if it was not extended quickly (Becker et al., 2010). These indications of the relevance of affect in early recruitment suggest that research on applicants’ actual decision-making processes and the role of affective qualities in these processes would be a valuable supplement to existent, outcome-centred studies on the topic.

In the following section, we illustrate the potential of this research focus by looking at studies of related phenomena (such as consumers’ perceptions of product brands), and at research showcasing the significance of affect in opinion- and decision-making processes in general.

Affect in target audience members’ responses to brands and branded artefacts

The concept of affect captures emotional states that are signified by a combination of arousal and valence (Russell, 2003; Winkielman et al., 2007). In the context of job seekers’ evaluation of potential employers, the degree of arousal indicates how intensely potential applicants react to employer information, and valence describes how they feel about it – namely, whether they respond to it in positive or negative ways. An affective state thus manifests as either a positive- or negative-valence emotion of low to strong intensity. For instance, worry – as an example of a negative emotion that might be elicited by employer information – can range from a potential applicant being slightly worried, to him or her being moderately or very worried, in response to employer brand material. Emotional reactions ‘that are directed toward a particular object or cause’ (Stevens and Seo, 2014: 127), specifically to employer brand material, are likely critical affective influences on early applicant attraction.

In the context of research on product branding, Romani et al. (2009) address what they identify to be a glaring lack of research on negative emotional reactions to brands, and they underline the importance of object encounters as a trigger for brand-related emotions. Their study convincingly illustrates the relevance of hate and dislike in target audience members’ responses to brands and branded artefacts. The study also reveals the potential for investigating those emotions by showing that ‘the negative emotions of dislike and anger [towards the brand] are experienced to a greater extent than others, such as sadness, fear and disappointment’ (Romani et al., 2009: 499). Karahanolu and Sener (2009) demonstrate that a misfit between product quality expectations and brand perceptions evokes negative emotions towards the brand, and suggest the conceptualization of branded products as a reference point for emotional reactions. Based on this idea, Romani et al. (2012) argue that emotions that are evoked by branded stimuli are predictors for specific behaviours toward brands. This line of argument is congruent with Schwarz and Clore’s (1983) affect-as-information approach. These authors famously noted that emotions influence judgements when they are experienced as reactions to what is being judged. Because emotions arise from implicit appraisals of situations with respect to their implications for one’s goals, they are experienced to have a clear source (what the emotion is about) (Schwarz, 2011). Clore et al. (2001) describe this to be a basic dynamic that also applies when an emotional response is misattributed to a stimulus while being evoked by a certain mood. This is to say that people generally attribute feelings they experience to whatever is at the focus of their attention, and routinely consider incidental feelings relevant to the task at hand. The affect-as-information framework stands in the tradition of psychological research that asserts that affect and cognition are interdependent processes (Simon, 1967), and specifically suggests ‘that people often make judgements by asking themselves (implicitly), ‘How do I feel about it?’’(Clore et al., 2001: 123). One poignant example of this phenomenon is the emotion of anger, as illustrated by Keltner et al. (1993). Anger is experienced as a negative emotion towards a (likely) cause. At the same time, anger also conveys information about a judgement of responsibility: The creator of the cause did something wrong. Such an interplay of affect and cognition has a strong impact on subsequent information processing. Given the affective intensity of reactions documented in the context of consumers’ encounters with product and corporate brands, we argue that affective notions in job seekers’ evaluations of a potential employer are likely to be at least as strong as these reactions. Maurer et al. (1992) link the task of marketing long-term services to consumers to communicating an attractive employer image to job seekers, because both situations involve particularly relevant decisions that lead to long-term, dynamic relationships between a firm and a member of its marketing messages’ target group. Possibly, job decisions may be even more relevant to individuals and create stronger personal involvement compared to purchase decisions (e.g. Baum et al., 2016). When people make decisions of direct relevance for themselves, affect has been shown to exert a stronger influence on their judgement (Raghunathan and Pham, 1999). Because of the high personal relevance and the far-reaching scope of decisions in the context of recruitment and employment, we can assume that the particular empirical context of employer-employee relationships might trigger even more, and potentially also different, emotional responses.

Research design

For our study, we brought together qualified human resources with employers in their field of expertise in order to investigate actual evaluations of employer attractiveness. We pursue a qualitative, explorative research design that is aimed at mirroring the situation of a job fair, where potential employees are confronted with various employers’ brands.

In the following sections, we outline the selection of our study participants (potential applicants and employers), as well as the study procedure and subsequent data analysis.

Study preparation and sample description

We identified tight labour market sectors in the region of Austria where the study was conducted, and then contacted HR managers of the largest employer for each branch to determine the type of workers that they aim to attract. The educational institutions from which they were looking to recruit alumni ranged from professional schools and advanced technical colleges to universities of applied sciences. We then found educators in five of these institutions who recommended eight particularly well-qualified graduates to be invited to participate in our study. Within the group of people who were suggested to us, there were initially no dropouts. However, one person did not show up at the agreed time and place, and one cancelled his appointment.

All of the eventual 38 study participants were interested in exploring employment options at the time of the study. The participants’ ages ranged from 17 to 39, with an average of 25.9 years, and they had an average of 3.5 years of full-time work experience. Male participants (66%) outnumbered female professionals (34%) in our sample, largely due to the dominance of male professionals in the technical work domains that were part of the labour markets selected for the study. Within the sample, 32% of the respondents had professional expertise in electrical or civil engineering, 26% in timber technology and 42% in the field of tourism. The educational institutions selected specialize in vocational and occupational education. They require their students to work for extended periods of time (as part of dual education programmes or in internships) before they can graduate. In accordance with the view of the companies’ HR managers, we consider the graduates of these schools to be qualified professionals.

To present the study participants with interesting potential employers, we selected four relevant, rival companies for each of the professional fields represented in the study. We first identified sector-relevant employers that are competing with one another for potential applicants. We presented our study design to the identified companies’ HR managers, and invited them to be a part of our study by providing the employer brand information that they typically offer to potential applicants. All of the contacted managers immediately expressed their interest, and all except one confirmed that they regularly distribute employer brand material to schools and participate in career fairs with the aim to attract potential applicants. With the exception of one company, which was in the process of developing its employer profile at the time, all of the selected companies supplied us with their standard repertoire of employer brand material. Typical items were various forms of branded information material (e.g. brochures and books), a range of small giveaways (e.g. USB sticks, pencils and notebooks) and specific application information (e.g. contact details in the form of a business card).

Study procedure

We equipped the study participants with camera glasses – miniature cameras worn at eye level, also called ‘subcams’ (Lahlou et al., 2015) – and asked them to explore the employer information provided by relevant companies. We also instructed them to articulate whatever came to their mind while engaging with the employer brand material that was available in unbranded boxes on a table (one box per employer). This procedure combines the idea of eliciting knowledge, in this case employer brand knowledge, through artefacts (e.g. Heisley and Levy, 1991) with concurrent verbalization as a way to collect data on cognitive processes to uncover reasons, motivations and process-related structures of behaviour (Ericsson and Simon, 1998). We asked for verbalized thoughts rather than a verbalization of the decision-making process, because detrimental effects in associative verbalization were found to be small and not significant when the participant’s focus is on the main task (Fox et al., 2011), and are outweighed by slower choice processing in concurrent verbalization settings (Berardi-Coletta et al., 1995; Berry and Broadbent, 1984). Following the study participants’ undisturbed verbalization of thoughts, they were asked to state how attractive they found each of the employers and to explain their evaluations. The audio data were transcribed verbatim, and linguistic transcription symbols (Gumperz and Berenz, 1993) were used to capture intonation.¹ We utilized the video data to eliminate uncertainties in our audio files. Since each participant explored three to four companies, our data set consists of a total of 142 cases, as each case is the evaluation of one employer by a participant.

Analysis

We conducted data analysis in a three-step process using the software Atlas.ti. To foster methodological rigour throughout the qualitative coding process, we used investigator triangulation procedures (Denzin and Krause, 1989) and made use of memoing in the form of research memos and theoretical memos (Holton, 2007; Roulston, 2008).

In the first step, we identified affectively charged statements in job seekers’ evaluations of employer attractiveness and categorized them according to their respective combination of valence and arousal. Since each emotion is either positive or negative in valence and shows a degree of arousal ranging from low to strong intensity, our categorization covered the following scale of affective states: very positive, positive, somewhat positive, somewhat negative, negative, and very negative. This structure conforms to the established representation of emotions in two-factor models, proposing that affective states can be arranged along two axes covering arousal from low to high, and valence from negative/displeasure to positive/pleasure (Bagozzi et al., 1999; Russell, 1997, 2003; Watson and Tellegen, 1985). If emotions changed within a single statement, they were coded as mixed. We categorized the overall evaluations of each employer’s attractiveness according to the same logic. Our investigator triangulation procedure in this part of the data analysis was to code the interviews in a paired coding setting in changing teams (first, authors 2 and 4, then authors 2 and 3, and then authors 3 and 4). In the pairs, one researcher independently conducted the coding, while the other researcher monitored the coding with a focus on contexts, and provided immediate feedback. As a result of this investigator triangulation process, we identified two general types of emotionally charged statements in our data: personal affective statements, in which respondents directly express their personal stance, and general affective statements, in which respondents present contents without explicitly taking ownership of them. Since this distinction appeared to be relevant with regard to the intensity of emotion expressed, we incorporated the distinction between a statement’s general or personal nature in our coding.

In the second step of data analysis, we used open coding to develop a coding framework to represent the contents of the identified affective statements (Benaquisto, 2008). Initially, three authors individually coded the contents of affective statements from a subsample of transcripts, and made suggestions for the consolidation of the content codes into broader thematic categories. These individual thematic categories then evolved through refinement in joint coding sessions into a coding framework comprising four consolidated categories and nine subordinate codes. Table 1 provides an overview of these codes, together with exemplary quotes.

Table 1.

Inductive content coding framework and sample quotes.

	Content category		Sample quote for
			Positive statement	Negative statement
Potential applicants’ …	subjective perception of	…quality of the contents of employer brand material	‘The whole thing is well structured/ always consistent/ so you catch the idea right away’ (C66_P19M-3_CE2)	‘There is too much text/ presumably no one will read this/ one could make this much more precise’ (C67_P19M-4_CE3)
		…quality of the form of employer brand material	‘The paper feels good; it is nice to handle and firm; I like it’ (C06_P2M-2_TT2)	‘This does not have enough corporate design/this is of middling quality but a little too unspectacular’ (C77_P22M-2_HI3)
		…purpose of organizational measures presented in the material	‘The production departments get daylight/ that is very important for the health of the employees’ (C117_P32M-2_TT2)	‘Pay is very bad/ they are obliged in Austria, I believe, to offer a minimum wage, the minimum gross wage/ this is an impertinence that is occurring here’ (C35_P10M-2_TT2)
		…purpose of employer brand material	‘I like it very much that you can see a family photo and that you know what the people look like that you are supposed to work with or for’ (C100_P28 F-1_HI2)	‘These aren’t things that I’d really like to have/ I have to say/ the sunglasses are a nice touch but not high quality/ the only item I’d appreciate is the champagne, which is usable at least’ (C112_P31 F-1_HI4)
	interpretation of	…meaning of organizational measures	‘The focus [of this employer] certainly is very much on the employees with the employee housing they just built’ (C16_P5 F-2_HI4)	‘This means to me that they only define themselves through their projects/ not through what they offer to their employees and stuff … they are a little too focused on themselves; get rid of that’ (C133_P36M-3_CE1)
		…meaning of employer brand material	‘One can tell that they – for the employees – that they care about them and their well-being, and they support them as well/ one can tell from the brochures’ (C23_P7M-1_EE3)	‘Again a little note: new apprentice – we are looking for you/ I am more and more drawn to suspect that [company] suffers from an acute employee crisis/ well, they are starting to overdo it’ (C35_P10M-2_TT2)
	evaluation of	…professional fit (professional dis/identification)	‘All right/ I have to say/ I like [company]/ even in spite of all these gifts that I did not think were great/ although the job descriptions were not provided/ but in principle, I don’t think this matters much …/ this is the best one/ because they are not so big/ at least they touched on the work–life balance/ and take care of being able to somehow live a life outside of work/ because engineers don’t do that very often’ (C126_P34M-4_CE4)	‘From [company], you hear, for example, that the employers have to work really hard/ sarcasm/ meaning that they have nothing to do all day long and you can see this too when they stand about and I am not really someone who likes standing about because then I fall asleep/ if necessary while standing/ and yes, that is why I would not join EE3 even when they are a great employer because they pay really well from what I hear [laughter], maybe for standing about; who knows?’ (C119_P33M-1_EE3)
		…personal fit (personal dis/identification)	‘And if there is a company founder like this who is not that aloof and who has built up everything, it is way more attractive for me compared to some random business story’ (C38_P11 F-2_TT2)	‘I believe [company] has extreme pressure because they are very successful and want to remain successful, and it is pretty rough over there, I believe/ that is not what I want’ (C106_P29 F-3_HI2)
	articulation of	… preconceptions	‘Well, I had heard through Facebook that they’ve done a paper chase with their employees/ I liked this very much’ (C95_P26M-4_HI2)	‘At EE3, I understand that they work a lot – I’m being sarcastic/ [laughter] I understand that employees have to drink a lot of coffee because it is so extremely exhausting’ (C119_P33M-1_EE3)

After we had coded all affective statements using the developed coding framework, we swapped the subsets of cases each of us had initially worked on and counterchecked one another’s coding.

Finally, in a third step, the authors jointly reviewed the coded data on a case-by-case basis to explore the impact of affectively charged statements and dynamics within potential applicants’ individual evaluations of employer attractiveness.

Results

Emotions are present throughout all 142 cases of potential applicants’ evaluations of employer information. There is no case without a display of emotional reactions to the employer brand material provided, and meaningful statements with regard to the respective opinion-making process generally show affective qualities.

Step 1: affective states

Of all 1182 statements that we identified as giving expression to combinations of valence and arousal, 92.8% were unambiguously associated with either positive or negative valence (with varying degrees of arousal), whereas the remaining 7.2% included aspects of emotional states of contrasting valence.² Within the statements of clear valence, the gap between the number of statements with positive valence (56%) versus those with negative valence (44%) was not large. This outcome is surprising, given that all of the presented employer brand material is intended to have a positive impact on its recipients.

Table 2 gives an overview of the absolute frequencies of low, moderate and high arousal for personal and general statements charged with positive or negative valence.

Table 2.

Frequencies of statements.

	Low arousal	Moderate arousal	High arousal
616 positive valence statements
Personal	67	209	62
General	123	128	27
Overall	190	337	89
481 negative valence statements
Personal	80	118	143
General	82	42	16
Overall	162	160	159

Positively charged statements are most frequently associated with moderate arousal and least frequently with high arousal, whereas the part of high-arousal negatively charged statements amounts almost exactly to the same number as the amount of moderate- and low-arousal negative statements. Consequently, the high-arousal utterances with a negative valence outnumber the high-arousal statements with a positive valence. The number of highly emotional critical statements (159) exceeds the number of affirmative statements (89) by 1.8 times.

Taking into account the distinction between personal and general statements, Table 2 shows the following pattern: General statements are most often associated with low and moderate arousal. The pattern for personal statements is considerably different, as personal statements are generally linked to stronger emotions. Whereas positive personal statements peak in the section of moderate arousal, negative personal statements increase in number as arousal intensifies.

In addition to negative affective states’ commonness of occurrence, two more aspects of our data analysis hint at the relevance of displeasure motives in potential applicants’ evaluations of employer brand information. First, critical expressions were almost twice as likely as affirmative statements to take the form of emotionally intense utterances. Second, negative statements predominantly contained personal contents. These indications for the particular relevance of affect in personal statements, and within them, especially in critical personal comments, mark our first important finding in addition to our insights regarding the presence of emotions in the potential applicants’ responses to employer information. Two key focal questions arise from this insight: first, whether highly emotional statements are associated with different contents than low-arousal statements, and second, whether negative emotions co-occur with subject matter differently from positive emotions. In the next section, we investigate the contents of emotionally charged statements to address these questions.

Step 2: affectively charged contents

Within all emotionally charged statements, we identified nine content codes that are grouped in four clusters of affectively charged contents. The following paragraphs describe the main groups regarding their affective characteristics.

Perceptions of employer brand material: quality and purpose of contents and form

Perception statements concern potential applicants’ perception of the quality and utility of employer brand material and typically refer to generic reasons that are presented in a matter-of-fact fashion. Accordingly, perception statements are the only category of statements that are more often phrased as general observations than as personal viewpoints, and they are mostly linked to low arousal, sometimes to moderate arousal and hardly ever to strong arousal. Perception statements are characteristically marked by emotions like interest, boredom and doubt. However, some negative perception statements also contain more forceful negative affective states (e.g. annoyance and irritation), which is the case in the following example, where a study participant became somewhat enraged over his doubts about the quality of the design and content of an employer’s brochure:

… what is this? A green folder of <8> esoteric folder <5> you feel the natural surface, you smell the fragrance of the forest {[laughing]} … {[quotes from the brochure]} wood is our building material that allows us to be creative/ {[end of quote]} I’m a timber dude but you can do this with concrete and stones as well/ These are only dumb slogans; they have no marketing message at all/ for me this completely lacks content/ … because they wanted to spend some money for marketing and had such a **fantastic** ad writer and graphic designer who got a shitload of money for such bullshit/ anyway, you *can’t* get me with *this*. (C35_P10M-2_TT2)

The contents of the positive comments concerning the perceived quality of the provided employer brand material are predominantly associated with professionalism, logic, consistency, competence and a visual and tacit appeal. A perceived lack of any of these features elicits critical statements. Apart from these contrasting assessment criteria, some perceived characteristics of employer brand material appear to provoke negative emotions, while their respective complementary features (i.e. sufficient information) do not stimulate positive statements. Specifically, too much or too little information can cause annoyance, frustration or anger with potential applicants, whereas we do not have evidence for positive emotions expressed about an employer distinctly for providing a sufficient amount of information.

These findings are in line with the circumstance that the rare instances of intensely emotional perception statements convey negative reactions. Moreover, this observation can be regarded as initial support for the tendency for stronger degrees of arousal in negative valence statements, which became evident from the first part of our data analysis.

Interpretations of aspects of employer brand material: alleged meanings of materials and measures

The category of interpretive statements accounts for the comments in which the participants create meaning about an employer based on features of their employer brand material or organizational measures that are referred to in the material. Positive and negative valences are roughly equally represented in these subjective assumptions about the meaning of selected aspects of information.

Interpretive statements’ degrees of arousal vary from low to high depending mainly on the personal character of their contents. In addition to moderate positive emotions (mostly interest, satisfaction and trust), lively positive emotions, such as pleasure and delight, are common affirmative reactions that are linked to suspected meanings. On the other side of the emotional spectrum, interpretations of aspects of employer information are tied to rather forceful affective states such as annoyance, irritation, contempt and, in several instances, even anger, which can be observed in the following statement:

I find it really disturbing that they created workplaces specifically for women … **What is that supposed to mean?** … it is *not appealing* for me/ … we *also* hire women; it sounds to me like ‘dogs are also allowed in the office’. (C51_P15F-1_TT3)

This reiterates the observation that negative-valence statements are linked to more forceful affective states. The main themes of positive meaning that are attributed to employers concern them being attentive to employees’ needs and making employees a priority, as illustrated in this quote:

This seems to be good, as it is a family business, and it seems to be more personal for the employees compared to the big hotel chains. (C42_P12F-3_HI2)

In addition to the negative counterparts to these topics, potential applicants sometimes conjecture that an employer’s employer branding efforts express its desperate situation in the labour market. Apart from these main themes, assumptions about employer brand features’ meaning regarding employer attractiveness cover a broad range of individual interpretations of specific characteristics. For example, the following participant made assumptions about the company’s leadership style and company culture based on a photograph of the company owners:

I can imagine them having a more authoritarian leadership style, as the boss is in the middle of the picture/ and it is probably not based on this whole lifestyle thing that’s so in vogue right now, but that it is more traditional and maybe more honest. (C15_P5F-1_HI2)

Some potential applicants considered perceivably unstructured information to be an indication of a chaotic workplace; other potential applicants took the same observation as a venture point to praise presumably wide scopes of job responsibilities and opportunities for a less rigid work environment.

(Dis)identification with the employer: professional and personal compatibility

Some 18% of all emotionally charged statements in potential applicants’ opinion-making processes concern their identification or disidentification with the employer. These statements are particularly common during the later stages of the participants’ employer evaluations and express their feelings about the thought of potentially working for the respective company. Almost all (dis)identification statements (90%) are presented as personal comments, and they are mostly linked to more intense affective states. In addition to the apparent insignificance of general and low-arousal comments within the (dis)identification statements, two trends stand out in this category regarding our specific interest in intense and negative emotions.

First, positive comments of identification are most commonly linked to moderate arousal, while negative statements of disidentification are most frequently associated with high arousal. Positive emotions predominantly peak in moderate emotions such as satisfaction and pleasure, with only a few isolated instances of more lively and intense emotions such as excitement and delight. Negative emotions often take more forceful forms, such as contempt, anger and annoyance, and occasionally also give expression to very personal negative feelings, such as fear, anxiety and shame, if a potential applicant feels overlooked or excluded from an employer’s target audience. In the following quotation, one female study participant relates to the perceived masculine culture of companies in a specific geographical area:

I don’t want to come back to this region/ as a woman you have to push through here and I don’t feel like it – to earn a status/ I want to have it from the beginning without having to fight for it/ I don’t want that. (C53_P15F-3_TT1)

In these sensitive cases, the potential applicants react strongly to aspects of employer information that they feel devalues them as a person or as a professional. Sometimes, they also dislike that something they identify with does not appear to be valued by the employer. Crucial topics in this context are specific values (e.g. an emphasis on environmental consciousness versus financial gains), attitudes (e.g. an emphasis on work ethos versus work–life balance) and social origin (e.g. an emphasis on elitism versus approachability).

The second noteworthy trend is that the bulk of high-arousal negative statements originate from comments that express personal disidentification. For example, the following participant questioned a company’s credibility regarding ecological and social sustainability:

Controls are not so strict over there … in Russia and Siberia they are cutting all the timber – there is a drunk Chinese controlling a machine who is cutting ‘brrrrrr’ timber from 6am until 10pm, and they do not care if it’s environmentally friendly or not/ and if they say in that brochure that everything is perfect, … I would say show me the contracts of your employees; show me the places where you cut all the timber. (C118_P32M-3_TT1)

Thus, at the heart of personal (dis)identification statements lies the issue of the perceived compatibility between the employment opportunity and personal values, hobbies or other identity sources, such as gender or social background.

Preconception statements: articulation of existing bias

Some 11% of the emotionally charged statements with a clear valence give expression to preexisting ideas about certain employers. The following participant already had a clear image of an employer that dominated her positive interpretation of the employer’s brand material:

I know someone who has worked there/ that would be very appealing for me because of the health theme/ I grew up with that/ my mum is an Ayurveda therapist/ and a family friend worked there as a doctor with a lot of esoteric stuff and friends and so on – that would be most appealing for me. (C107_P29F-4_HI1)

As in this example, preexisting employer images contain first- and secondhand accounts of positive or negative experiences or observations, include general remarks about a perceivably positive or negative employer or company image and occasionally also single out negative rumours about a company. Concerning their emotional characteristics, these statements are distributed fairly evenly throughout all affective states.

Step 3: the role of affectively charged statements

Overall, our findings suggest that negative statements, in part, cover distinct topics and are linked to different and more intense emotions than positive statements. In addition, in reviewing the types of content statements described above, high-arousal statements are noticeably associated with different contents than moderate- or low-arousal statements, specifically with issues tangent to personal and professional (dis)identification.

Throughout our data, we noticed that high-arousal statements appear to have a high level of congruence with the outcome of the evaluative process, in the form of an overall attractiveness assessment. We observed that, in several instances, high-arousal statements introduced a perceptive trend. That is, in many cases, all subsequent statements to a very strong affective comment had the same valence. We found congruence between the valence of high-arousal statements and the valence expressed in the assessment of employer attractiveness in 75.2% of our 142 cases.

The cases where the potential applicants’ final assessment of an employer’s attractiveness has the contrasting valence to a highly emotional comment made during the evaluative process are comparatively rare, as are the cases in which high-intensity affective statements of positive and negative valence coincide within the evaluative process. These changes of heart often involved leaving behind preconceived positive or negative feelings towards an employer. Preconceptions were usually introduced early in the evaluative process. If the potential applicants subsequently felt let down by an employer that they had expressed very positive feelings towards, or if they were positively surprised by an employer that they had emotionally rejected initially, they reacted strongly and veered their affective judgement to the opposite end of the spectrum.

Occasionally, strong emotions about an employer changed in the course of the overall study process because of how this one employer compared to the other firms in the study. In some instances, the participants revoked positive feelings when other employers appeared to be even more attractive, and sometimes the potential applicants developed positive emotions towards an employer that they perceived to be better than the rest, even if they previously felt negatively about this same employer.

Discussion and implications: contexts and relevance of affective states in the attractiveness evaluation process

This paper proposes affective states as a frame of reference to broaden our understanding of how potential applicants become attracted to organizations. It suggests that examining both negative and positive emotions holds valuable new insights for studying applicant attraction. In accordance with research on the development of consumers’ attitudes towards brands and associated consumer behaviour (e.g. Ding and Tseng, 2015; Karahanolu and Sener, 2009; Romani et al., 2012), our findings outline the prevalence of affect in potential applicants’ assessments of employer brand material, and detail some of the specific contexts and possible effects of affective responses. Subjective fit perceptions, social identity constructions and comparisons among rival employers appear to be particularly relevant topics for potential applicants’ emotional responses to employer information. Moreover, the results from our study imply that strong affective responses often correspond with the valence of a final decision about the perception of an employer as (not) attractive. Our finding that strong emotions are more common in critical comments indicates that negative emotions might play a very sensitive role in potential applicants’ evaluations of employer attractiveness. To discuss these findings and their relevance to employer attractiveness research, we advance the following four propositions.

Proposition I: intense emotional statements influence attractiveness decisions

Within the opinion-making processes, we observed and analysed that highly emotional statements of either valence are mostly congruent with the eventual attractiveness decisions made. This observation is in line with Romani et al.’s (2012) finding that emotions evoked by branded stimuli predict actors’ behaviour towards that brand. It also mirrors Schwarz and Clore’s (1983) finding that emotions can induce a perceptive bias that leads to a biased interpretation of subsequent information, and that a high intensity of emotion increases this effect: The more positive or negative that the initial affect is, the more positive or negative that the things or events encountered seem. We found that this trend also applies to high-arousal statements in our data, and that less emotional statements do not show a traceable impact on the trajectory or outcome of the opinion-making process.

In reference to the affect-as-information theory, we thus propose that there is very high congruence between high-arousal emotions and like-valenced decision-making, while the same cannot be said of low-arousal affective states. Considering the strong association of statements covering subjects of (dis)identification with high arousal, the exploration of emotions in early attraction in the context of person–organization fit (e.g. Cable and Judge, 1996) and applicant–job fit is an important and promising topic for future research.

Conceptually and empirically, emotions are a fundamental aspect of identity and identity work (Winkler, 2018). However, in the employer branding studies that are based on social identity theory (e.g. Highhouse et al., 2007) or that focus on job seekers’ identity work when assessing potential future employers (e.g. Appleby et al., 2018), emotions are not systematically addressed. Their inclusion in identity-driven analyses of potential applicants’ evaluation of employer attractiveness represents a meaningful addition to the current research agenda.

Proposition II: negative emotions play a crucial role in attractiveness decisions

We found the role of negative emotions to be particularly interesting because negative statements with strong emotions are more common than equally intense positive statements, and the emotional qualities we observed in negative statements also included more forceful affective responses. These findings are particularly relevant in light of empirical research that shows that negative emotions generally have a stronger impact on the minds and behaviour of human beings than positive emotions (e.g. Baumeister et al., 2001). People remember negative emotions better than positive ones (Baumeister et al., 2001), and negative emotions cause more systematic and careful information processing than positive emotions (e.g. Clore et al., 1994). Given the apparent influence of strong, negative emotions on outcomes of potential applicants’ evaluations of employers’ attractiveness, we suggest that a particular focus on the exploration of negative emotions seems to be a worthwhile endeavour for future research on initial applicant attraction. Existing studies on the particularities of negative emotions in target audience members’ responses to consumer brands and associated branded artefacts (e.g. Romani et al., 2009), as well as research on the impact of negative emotions on recruiting processes and outcomes (Stevens and Seo, 2014), can serve as an interesting venture point since they identify specific negative emotions that they find to be particularly volatile in the context of employer brand experiences.

Furthermore, the research on negative emotions in employer branding and employee attraction could be linked to the intensity of job seekers’ processing of employer information. Research on job seekers’ process of developing employer images, mainly in the context of the elaboration likelihood model (e.g. Collings, 2007; Jones et al., 2006), could investigate the impact of negative emotions on potential applicants’ information processing.

Proposition III: some employer information subjects provoke negative emotions, whereas their respective counterparts do not stimulate positive affective responses

A particularity we noticed in our analysis of the contents of negative-valence versus positive-valence affective statements is that some subjects cause dissatisfaction and other negative emotions if evaluation criteria are not met, but do not lead to satisfaction and other positive emotions if they are. This finding is a distinctly different phenomenon in comparison to the idea found in popular value models of applicant attraction, which propose that the fit or misfit between a potential applicant’s professional values and the employer value proposition evokes positive or negative emotions, respectively, towards the employer (Osborn, 1990). In contrast to bipolar evaluation criteria (typically measuring the extent to which a criterion is met) that can lead to either favourable or detrimental assessments of the very same subjects, negative-polarity evaluation criteria (typically measuring a perceived lack or shortcoming) exclusively evoke negative assessments, and thus negative emotions. We therefore propose that some subjects that provoke negative emotions do not stem from a perceived misfit with an applicant’s individual evaluation criteria but are of a more general nature. In reference to the suggestion that ‘the criteria used to evaluate jobs typically drive how and where people search and which openings they pursue or abandon’ (Stevens and Seo, 2014: 127), a focus on the exploration of subjects that exclusively elicit negative emotions towards employer brands seems to be a promising direction in employer branding research.

Proposition IV: expectations towards an employer, and comparisons among employers, influence potential applicants’ sentiments about individual employers

Two aspects of our findings particularly highlight the relevance of situational dynamics and contexts for emotional responses. First, the lack of consistency within potential applicants’ evaluations of different employers indicates that their preconceptions or expectations towards an employer inform their opinion-making process, albeit not in an obvious way. In our study, we found that high-arousal preconception statements of one valence can lead to an overall attractiveness assessment of contrasting valence. This dynamic is likely to be induced by the ‘mismatch between anticipated and realized emotions’ (Stevens and Seo, 2014: 130) in this situation. A misfit between expectations and brand perceptions has been shown to evoke negative emotions in the context of consumer brands (Karahanolu and Sener, 2009), but has been given little attention in early applicant attraction. However, Baum et al. (2016) show that the perceived incongruence between a preexisting employer image and recruitment advertisements may lead to uncertainty and negative evaluations. Future research could further investigate the interplay of expectations towards individual employers, the perceived incongruence of information and the affective judgements of employers.

Second, our finding that potential applicants sometimes change their opinions about an employer’s attractiveness as a consequence of engaging with other employers’ information material suggests that favourable and unfavourable comparisons among employers can evoke positive or negative emotions. In some cases in our study, the impact of this dynamic was strong enough for potential applicants to completely eradicate very negative or very positive affectively charged statements made about an employer during the evaluative process and come to a completely different overall attractiveness assessment. Pham et al. (2001) note that the impact of feelings as information generally decreases when other, more relevant inputs are accessible. We propose that comparisons between employers might work to that effect, with potential applicants developing a certain level of expertise about employer brands and job opportunities. Comparisons between employers and potential applicants’ knowledge about employment opportunities, as relevant aspects of potential applicants’ affective evaluations of employer attractiveness, could be explored in future research on the job search process.

Conclusions and practical implications

In sum, the four propositions derived from the empirical findings of the study presented in this paper reaffirm the relevance of emotions within job seekers’ opinion-making processes and suggest that special attention should be paid to strong and negative emotions in the recruiting phase of initial applicant attraction. General research on the effects of emotions shows that negative feelings are likely to last longer and be remembered more vividly (even if they were misattributed) than positive ones, that even a single aspect that elicits a strong negative response can overshadow previous positive impressions, and that emotions in general have a distorting effect on the perception of information (the affect-as-information effect). In our study, we found that employer brand information can elicit strong emotions, and that the topics causing intense emotions are mostly personal issues of (dis)identification. Furthermore, potential applicants rarely take employer information at face value, instead relying on their interpretations of implicit information they perceive (e.g. implications of a photograph of the founding family in the material). In this context, expectations stemming from previous information about a company or from information about other employers appear to be of critical influence on the development of positive or negative sentiments towards an employer. The main contribution of our study is that our explorative investigation of the role of affective states in the recruiting phase of early applicant attraction allowed us to outline implications for research on the perception of employer information in the form of four conceptual propositions presented in the discussion section.

Apart from these research implications, our findings also allow us to draw an assumption about the general practical relevance of emotions in the context of employer branding, and make tentative suggestions on implications for employer brand management. First, organizations have to acknowledge the real possibility that potential applicants might respond critically to well-intended messages. This is – at least in part – because potential applicants’ reactions are not purely rational, criteria-based assessments. Instead, these evaluative processes are also influenced by feelings that directly stimulate judgement and have a decisive impact on how subsequent information is received and interpreted by the potential applicant. In light of the potential negative judgement that not only discourages a potential applicant, but can also cause further damage to the employer image, communication to potential employees and the imminent threat of a negative response to employer information should be taken seriously. Therefore, employer branding should not be considered as a necessary task to compete with other employers in the same labour market sector. It needs to be regarded as an integral and distinct part of an organization’s human resource management. Second, when considering the significant roles of emotions in potential applicants’ opinion-making processes about an employer, managers in charge of employer brand communication are tasked with trying to stimulate positive emotions (e.g. pleasure, trust, satisfaction), but even more importantly, to pay particular attention to avoiding negative emotions (e.g. disappointment, annoyance, anger). Although more research would be required to give substantial recommendations as to what specific factors trigger what emotional responses, the findings we presented in this manuscript suggest that similarities between rival employers’ sets of information are a likely source of negative responses such as mistrust, annoyance or even anger. Thus, employer brand activities and material of other employers should not just be used as a benchmark, but also in order to clearly distinguish one’s own messages and forms of presentation from those of other employers. Another sensitive issue that appears to cause frustration, annoyance, boredom and disappointment with potential applicants concerns very general statements that are perceived as generic and, therefore, meaningless and inauthentic, unless they are backed up by more specific, detailed information. Finally, in our research context of qualified human resources, potential applicants felt offended by employer brand manifestations that they perceived as low-quality (e.g. poor paper quality), not useful (e.g. repetitive and redundant information) or not well thought through (e.g. a company in the technical sector gifting them a plastic ballpoint pen instead of a lead pencil that is typically used for technical drawings).

Scope and limitations

Several recruitment researchers identify the importance of using realistic scenarios in recruitment research to account for various facets of applicant reactions to employer information (e.g. Saks, 2014; Swider et al., 2015). However, our choice of an unstandardized study design also implies several limitations. Due to our focus on emotions throughout potential applicants’ evaluations of employer brand material, isolated effects on image perception are not within the scope of our research. In this regard, the heterogeneity of the employers and employer brand material that are used in our study is an advantage for our main study aim but prevents us from being able to make any claims about the effects of the quantity or quality of the material or the already existing employer image on the perceived attractiveness of employers. Similarly, we cannot rule out that some emotional expressions in our data capture current moods rather than reflect direct responses to the material. Nevertheless, given the large sample size for a qualitative study, we assume that this issue does not adversely affect our findings and reflects the real-life possibility that moods influence subjective employer material perceptions.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The research presented in this article was part of the research project EBKOM, which was funded by the Tyrolian State Government’s Translational Research Programme.

Notes

ORCID iD

Gabriela Edlinger

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