Impact of word-of-mouth, job attributes and relationship strength on employer attractiveness

Faiz Ahamad

Management Research Review, 2019, vol. 42, issue 6, 721-739

Abstract: Purpose - Job information through word-of-mouth (WOM) has a crucial impact on employer attractiveness. The phenomenal rise of social media offers alternate WOM platforms for sharing job information, which is quite different from traditional face-to-face WOM. The purpose of this paper is to examine the differential impact of traditional word-of-mouth (t-WOM) and social media word-of-mouth (s-WOM) on employer attractiveness along with the difference in the job attributes and relationship strength with the information source. Design/methodology/approach - A 2 × 2 × 2 experiment was conducted to examine the impact of information source (t-WOM and s-WOM), job attributes (tangible and intangible) and relationship strength (strong and weak), on employer attractiveness. Source expertise and source trust were treated as the control variable. Findings - The result shows the differential impact of t-WOM and s-WOM on employer attractiveness. Moreover, t-WOM from strong relation source found to have a high impact on employer attractiveness than s-WOM. No significant difference due to job attributes was found. Research limitations/implications - Use of only positive WOM and not the negative one, student as the subjects, etc. Practical implications - The present study suggests using t-WOM and s-WOM to attract talented job seekers. Originality/value - This is the first study to analyze the differential impact of t-WOM and s-WOM on employer attractiveness.

Keywords: Human resource management; Recruitment; Word-of-mouth; Social media; Relationship strength; Employer attractiveness; Job attributes; Job seeker; Tangible and intangible attributes (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eme:mrrpps:mrr-11-2017-0382

DOI: 10.1108/MRR-11-2017-0382

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