Search results

Drawing on the psychological contract theory and signaling theory, the purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to examine the effect of employer rankings and employment experience on employee recommendation of an employer as an employer of choice and second, to examine whether these effects vary by employee characteristics (i.e. full-time vs part-time, current vs former and newcomers vs established employees).

The authors used multilevel logistic regression on a sample of 39,010 Glassdoor employee reviews, drawn from the companies for which three-year employer rankings (from 2015 to 2017) were available, to achieve our research objectives.

The results show that employment experience influenced employees’ recommendation of an employer as an employer of choice. The average standardized rankings for three years (i.e. 2015–2017) was also associated with employees’ recommendation of an employer as an employer of choice. Employee characteristics such as employment type (i.e. full-time vs part-time), employment status (i.e. current vs former) and tenure significantly interacted with employment experience in affecting recommendations of a company as an employer of choice.

In contrast to the bulk of the research on employer branding that relied on job seekers, the authors studied factors that influence employees’ recommendation of an employer as an employer of choice, arguably the most important indicator of employer internal brand strength. The results offer fresh theoretical and practical insights in an area where research lags far behind practice.

What matters most for improving work quality and who can make a difference are perennial topics in employee relations research. The literature on work quality provides answers to these with regard to various constructs on a continuum from “soft” to “hard” variables and stakeholders seeking to influence employers who fall short of reasonable expectations with regard to these. A construct of “decent work” with both soft and hard variables was adopted for research and methods which were collaborative and participative with stakeholders in one national context.

The “decent work” construct was operationalised from the literature and refined by collaborative and participative research. Exploring the relative importance of the constituent parts of decent work involved research with a range of stakeholders; employees, employers and advocates. The study involved most prominently low-paid workers, with employers and advocates also engaged through interviews.

Primarily hard “decent work” variables were identified among employees, primarily soft variables among employers and a mix of hard and soft among advocates. There are some common priorities across these stakeholders.

The main implication is that to engage a range of stakeholders requires a combination of soft and hard variables to be included in research and policy development. However, generalisation about what matters most and who makes a difference to work quality is intrinsically limited in context and time. In this research, the extent of employer engagement in the collaboration initiated by advocates and concerned most with the experiences of low-paid workers is a limitation.

What matters most are a set of soft and hard priorities to engage across stakeholders. Pay is an abiding priority among these and the priority most prominent for many advocates seeking to make a difference through influencing low-paying employers to provide a living wage. While the living wage is a significant focus for work quality, it is not in itself sufficient, as other soft and hard variables in the workplace matter as well. Those who can make a difference are the employers falling short of benchmark standards. Influence on these may emerge through decent work knowledge and skills in management and professional development programmes as well as in initiatives advocating wider adoption of the living wage.

Problem areas of work quality, and problem employers, can be influenced by strategies shaping “hard” factors, including legislation. This needs to be complemented and integrated with strategies on “soft” factors, including identifying positive role models on themes of well-being, work–life balance and precarious forms of employment, as well as pay.

The identification of what matters and who can make a difference is based on an original, collaborative, research project, in one national context, offering analytical generalisability about “decent work” and an experience of collaborative research.

Reports on a study of current and past training literature which suggests that, to be effective and to isolate both training needs and those problems having other, non‐trainable solutions, training must be preceded by a needs analysis. Proposes a needs assessment model to illustrate an optimum needs assessment process, and compares this model with the Ontario Government′s “Ontario Skill” (OS) programme, a multi‐million dollar, provincially‐funded training scheme. If, as the literature suggests, needs assessment must preclude training, then it is likely that OS monies are being wasted, as under the current administrative system it is virtually impossible to conduct in‐depth assessments. Suggests ways in which needs assessment can be improved, by shifting the burden from the Government′s consultants onto specially‐trained employer representatives. It is felt that such a shift would enable sufficient time to be spent on the thousands of needs assessments conducted every year under the auspices of this massive training initiative. The methodology suggested here would be applicable to any large‐scale provincial or state‐run industrial training programme.

The study aims to explore the relationship between the employer branding (EB) dimension of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and employee retention (ER) while testing for organizational identification (OI) as a mediator, within a single framework.

The study is cross-sectional, and the data were collected from 126 employees working in the Indian information technology (IT) companies. Regression technique and PROCESS macro were deployed to analyze the data.

The findings asserted that, first, the EB dimension of CSR influences ER. Second, CSR significantly affected OI and was found to be a strong predictor of ER. Third, the relationship between CSR and ER is mediated by OI.

Organizations should embed ethical stance in their policies, practices and procedures to retain a skilled workforce. Further, CSR as an EB dimension, while being imperative for improving employee-related outcomes, does not necessarily help to enhance retention of employees unless the employees build a strong identity with their work organization.

The study connotes that organizations should be more socially responsible for achieving better employer status among various stakeholders. A well-designed strategy pertaining to CSR may increase the reputation of an employer as an attractive place to work for current and prospective employees.

The paper examined CSR as an important attribute of employer branding for retaining competent employees in the Indian setting; studies on CSR as an EB dimension are limited. The results focus on embracing socially responsible behavior of organizations and on examining the role of OI as a mediating variable.

In the context of a corporate case study, this paper aims to propose and test a talent analytics model that enables organisations to optimise their employer value propositions and branding strategies in a comparative manner.

After the conceptual framework was translated into a quantitative model, data were collected via online self-completed questionnaires and analysed with statistical techniques.

Revealing misalignments with the employment preferences of Gen Z, the model’s capability to optimise employer value propositions and branding strategies is effectively demonstrated.

Providing an actionable framework for corporate and academic readers, this paper has scope to serve as a guide for scholarly or practitioner talent analytics projects focused on attraction.

Focused exclusively on attraction, to the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first paper to apply an in-depth talent analytics model which prescribes employer branding as a mediator variable.

To understand human resource (HR) practices outcomes on HR decision making, strategic human resource management (HRM) and organizational performance by exploring the HR data quality along with descriptive and predictive financial and non-financial metrics.

This work utilizes the grounded theory method. After the literature was reviewed, 113 HR managers of multinational and national companies in India were interviewed with a semi-structured questionnaire. The collected interview data was analyzed with NVivo 8.0 software.

It is interesting to uncover the descriptive and predictive non-financial and financial metrics of HR practices and their influence on organizational performance. It was found that HR data quality moderates the relationship between the HR practices outcome and HR metrics. This study found that HR metrics help in HR decision-making for strategic HRM and subsequently affect organizational performance.

This study has uniquely provided the descriptive and predictive non-financial and financial metrics of HR practices and their impact on HR decision making, strategic HRM and organizational performance. This study highlights the importance of data quality. This research offers insights to the HR managers, HR analysts, chief HR officers and HR practitioners to achieve organizational performance considering the various metrics of HRM. It provides key insights to the top management to understand the HR metrics' effect on strategic HRM and organizational performance.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how the Japanese and Taiwanese national quality assurance (QA) agencies, National Institution for Academic Degrees and Quality Enhancement (NIAD-QE) and Higher Education Evaluation and Accreditation Council of Taiwan (HEEACT), transform their respective frameworks in response to social demands, and analyze and compare the respective approaches for the key concepts of autonomy, accountability, improvement and transparency.

Using a qualitative document analysis approach, this paper initially examines the higher education system, major policies and QA developments, after which the methods associated with the QA restructuring transformations are outlined in terms of motivations, expectations and challenges. Finally, the NIAD-QE and HEEACT evaluation policies and frameworks are compared to assess how each has prepared to respond to emerging challenges.

During the QA framework restructuring, both the NIAD-QE and HEEACT struggled to achieve autonomy, accountability, improvements and transparency. While the new internal Japanese QA policy is assured through the external QA, the Taiwanese internal QA, which has a self-accreditation policy, is internally embedded with university autonomy emphasized. The QA policies in both the NIAD-QE and HEEACT have moved from general compliance to overall improvement, and both emphasize that accountability should be achieved through improvements. Finally, both agencies sought transparency through the disclosure of the QA process and/or results to the public and the enhancement of public communication.

This study gives valuable insights into the QA framework in Asian higher education institutions and how QA has been transformed to respond to social needs.

The purpose of this study is to determine whether there is a significant difference between employers and students on their perceptions of the importance of skills and traits critical for securing entry‐level employment in operations management. Another major concern in this study is whether employers value general skills more than technical abilities. To address our research questions, a two‐page questionnaire was developed. We found significant differences in mean scores between employers and students in their perceptions of the importance of general skills, technical skills, and personality characteristics. In addition, our findings indicate that employers value general skills significantly higher than technical skills. The results of this study provide a foundation for operations management programs in curricula reengineering and ultimately provide the business community with more qualified applicants.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the factors relating to retention of employers on an undergraduate work placement programme in a third level institution.

An action research methodology involving problem diagnosis, intervention planning, action and evaluation is employed. The diagnosis involved a survey of 130 employers that had taken students on placement during the first two years of the placement programme. The action research also involved workshops with the work placement team and the making of an intervention with respect to enhancing the placement process through the introduction of a Priority Partner initiative for 26 of the employers.

The survey findings reveal differences in the ranking of importance of college selection criteria by employers, as well the impact of the placement manager's characteristics on the placement process. The intervention findings show that the employer retention percentage increased for the Priority Partners but remained the same for the other employers.

The study reports qualitative findings in the context of a placement programme in one institution which limits external validity.

Employer retention would seem to be improved with the development of a customer relations management orientation with employers. The role of the placement manager is pivotal to enhancing the retention of employers as is the quality and professionalism of the work placement service.

New empirical data extends the very limited understanding of company retention on work placement programmes.

In Switzerland, the first and only Swiss quality label for systematic workplace health management (WHM) competes with a variety of national and international workplace-related labels for the attention of employers. The purpose of this paper is to compare the label “Friendly Work Space” (FWS) with ten other national and international workplace-related labels on the “Swiss label market” and to identify key success elements for the development and dissemination of WHM labels.

A literature review and qualitative analysis of publicly available documents were conducted. Information was obtained from providers or by the authors’ own research. A description of workplace-related labels is presented based on defined criteria and a typology classifying workplace-related labels available in Switzerland.

Workplace-related labels can be differentiated in terms of: deliberate registration vs non-requested selection, policy vs marketing approach and assessment vs survey-based analysis. In terms of sustainable dissemination, FWS is the most successful registration-based label in Switzerland regarding the number of employees and employers benefitting from the label. Therefore, it constitutes a best practice approach for developing and disseminating a WHM label.

To the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to systematically analyse and compare a WHM with other workplace-related labels on a national market (supply and demand, quality, dissemination). The authors suggest a specific typology to describe the market. Recommendations are given to build up and successfully disseminate a WHM label on a national scale.