The Use of Corporate Social Responsibility in Employer Branding

Abstract

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become an essential part of business, and companies should genuinely incorporate social responsibilities toward internal and external stakeholders in their operations. The most important stakeholder group is the personnel, which is why employers should pay attention to strengthening the employer–employee relationship. The purpose of this text is to demonstrate the connections between employer branding and CSR.

Theory on employer branding and CSR indicates that there are both strategic and operational connections. Strategically, employer branding can be considered the outcome of the co-operation among branding, CSR, and human resource management (HRM). At an operational level, there are several CSR activities that can be of use when developing and implementing economic, functional, and psychological employer-branding elements.

In order to establish how CSR is used in employer branding in practice, a qualitative content analysis of the website communication of three multinational IT companies was made. All of the companies have been acknowledged for their strong internal employer brands, and the analysis focused on what types of CSR activities they communicate externally as part of their employer branding efforts.

The study concludes that CSR can be relevant to employer branding and presents a categorization model for facilitating a concrete integration of CSR and employer-branding elements.

Citation

Lindholm, L. (2018), "The Use of Corporate Social Responsibility in Employer Branding", Koporcic, N., Ivanova-Gongne, M., Nyström, A.-G. and Törnroos, J.-Å. (Ed.) Developing Insights on Branding in the B2B Context, Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 73-93. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-78756-275-220181005