Changing an Unfavorable Employer Reputation: The Roles of Recruitment Message-Type and Familiarity with Employer

Abstract

An unfavorable employer reputation can impair an organization’s ability to recruit job seekers. The present research employed a four-week longitudinal experimental design to investigate whether recruitment messages can positively change an existing unfavorable employer reputation. Two hundred and twenty-two (222) job seekers rated their perceptions of an organization before and after being randomly assigned to receive a series of high- or low-information recruitment messages. As expected, job seekers receiving high-information messages changed their perceptions more than job seekers who were exposed to low-information messages. In addition, job seekers’ initial familiarity with the employer was negatively related to change in their perceptions of employer reputation. Finally, there was some evidence that job seekers’ familiarity with the employer influenced the impact of different recruitment messages. Implications for research and practice are discussed.