Integrating Employees’ Experiences into Employer Brand Development through Organisational Identity Work

Attracting, recruiting, retaining and engaging employees is one of the biggest challenges facing organisations, and have been cited as critical for competitive advantage and organisational success. Consequently, the employer brand concept of talent management has become a recognised industry for human resources, marketing, internal communications specialists and is of strategic importance for senior executives’ agendas. However, existing research in this field has focused on the perspectives and behaviours of applicants with limited research considering the internal perspective of how the experience of existing employees can be understood, leveraged and integrated into employer brand development. Furthermore, of those few studies that have considered the internal perspective, most have focused on identifying the antecedents and effects of employer branding. As such, there has been little investigation into the ‘how’ or processes underpinning employer brand development, particularly from an employee-centred perspective. Drawing on identity theory, I explore how organisations can incorporate their existing employee experiences into their employer branding process, using a phenomenological case study of a multi-national MedTech organisation. My case uses data obtained from interviews with eighty employees. These data provided support for the claim that strength of industry is vital in how employees internalise their work experiences, as well as a process of organisational identity work underpinning employer brand development. In doing so, I contribute to theory on how organisations can incorporate their existing employee experiences into their employer branding processes.