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This chapter explores different strategies implemented by three companies using professional (LinkedIn) and non-professional (Facebook) social networking websites (SNWs) as a recruitment tool and investigates the influence of their perceived usability and attractiveness on job seekers’ attraction and their intention to apply.

First, a laboratory experiment involving 171 MBA students compares the effectiveness of three different social recruitment strategies. Second, a survey among 110 job seekers focuses on the most effective strategy in terms of attraction as an employer and the influence of perceived usability and attractiveness of professional SNW pages on job seekers’ intention to pursue the job.

The laboratory experiment confirms the key role of LinkedIn as an e-recruitment practice. The survey shows that the overall company image, the usability of the LinkedIn page and the interaction between the attractiveness of the page and the overall company image positively influence job seekers’ intention to pursue the job.

The research offers insights on job seekers’ reactions to 2.0 Internet-based recruitment. Companies should focus on and invest in professional social medias, paying attention to the usability of their SNWs pages.

Recruitment is a strategic HRM practice to attract talents; however, research lags behind practice and little is known about job seekers’ perceptions and reactions to Internet recruitment. This chapter sheds light on the use of social media for recruitment and identifies two features that contribute to an effective e-recruitment strategy.

Massive shifts in the recruitment landscape, the continually changing nature of work and workers, and extraordinary technological progress have combined to enable unparalleled advances in how current and prospective employees receive and process information about organizations. Once the domain of internal organizational public relations and human resources (HR) teams, most employment branding has moved beyond organizations’ control. This chapter provides a conceptual framework pertaining to third party employment branding, defined as communications, claims, or status-based classifications generated by parties outside of direct company control that shape, enhance, and differentiate organizations’ images as favorable or unfavorable employers. Specifically, the authors first theorize about the underlying mechanisms by which third party employment branding might signal prospective and current employees. Second, the authors develop a framework whereby we comprehensively review third party employment branding sources, thus identifying the different ways that third party employment branding might manifest. Third, using prototypical examples, the authors link the various signaling mechanisms to the various third party employment branding sources identified. Finally, the authors propose an ambitious future research agenda that considers not only the positive aspects of third party employment branding but also potential “dark sides.” Thus, the authors view this chapter as contributing to the broader employment branding literature, which should enhance scholarly endeavors to study it and practitioner efforts to leverage it.

Although the importance of social media in the HRM literature is well established, little is known about their potential role in bringing the “human component” at the center of the organization. The purpose of this chapter is to conceptually investigate if and how the use of social media in HRM can support (or counteract) a more humanistic approach within organizations. To this aim, we looked into how the e-HRM literature on social media could match the principles posed by the Humanistic Management literature. After having delineated Humanistic Management principles, we frame our analysis focusing on four main topics related to HRM: organizational culture, leadership, job design, and HR practices (i.e., recruitment and selection, learning and training, and performance appraisal and compensation). We develop research propositions connecting humanistic principles with these organizational and HR areas, and conclude with research and managerial implications.

Two primary approaches have been used to study employment brands and branding. First, there is a long history of the study of organizational attraction. Second, in the past 10–15 years, there has been growth in a hybrid stream of research combining branding concepts from the consumer psychology literature with I/O psychology frameworks of organizational attraction and applicant job search behavior. In this chapter, we take an entirely different approach and suggest that the theoretical models built around product/service brand knowledge can readily accommodate employment brands and branding without hybridizing the framework with I/O psychology. This merging of employment brand with product and service brands is accomplished simply by recognizing employment as an economic exchange between workers and employers and recognizing workers as cognitive and emotional beings that vary in their talents and have their own vectors of preferences for the employment offering. After developing a testable model of the components, antecedents, and consequences of employment brand knowledge, we review the existing employment brand and organizational attraction literature and identify multiple opportunities for additional research.

Over the past decade, the rapid evolution of social media has impacted the field of human resource management in numerous ways. In response, scholars and practitioners have sought to begin an investigation of the myriad of ways that social media impacts organizations. To date, research evidence on a range of HR-related topics are just beginning to emerge, but are scattered across a range of diverse literatures. The principal aim of this chapter is to review the current literature on the study of social media in HRM and to integrate these disparate emerging literatures. During our review, we discuss the existent research, describe the theoretical foundations of such work, and summarize key research findings and themes into a coherent social media framework relevant to HRM. Finally, we offer recommendations for future work that can enhance knowledge of social media’s impact in organizations.

The study reported in this chapter was designed to investigate how managers representing public relations (PR), human resources (HR), and corporate social responsibility (CSR) departments use their organizations’ CSR initiatives to attract, engage, and retain job-seeking Millennials. To direct attention to a region that has been plagued with employee attraction and retention issues, this study focused this phenomenon as experienced by organizations located in the state of Michigan. Findings identify ways PR, HR, and CSR departments work together to infuse work cultures with CSR thinking. Four main themes and 14 subthemes emerged among interview data – suggesting that employee recruitment activities should evolve to more fully consider CSR in terms of employee value propositions, organizational culture, and empowering and developing employees.

Homophily, or the tendency for individuals to be attracted to those who resemble them, is significantly influential in the formation of startup founding and top management teams. But its role in subsequent stages of startup growth remains largely unclear. We consider the impact of homophily on matching of early workers to startups. We propose that, in the case of underrepresented minority groups, the tendency toward homophily plays an important role in this matching process, albeit in an asymmetric way. In particular, homophily exerts a stronger influence on the supply than the demand side: job candidates are more inclined to favor startups with demographically similar founders than startup founders are inclined to favor demographically similar job-seekers. Focusing on an important group of historically disadvantaged workers – women – we examine these arguments using unique data on the online recruiting of high-tech startups concentrated in the Silicon Valley. We find evidence suggesting that female candidates' propensity to apply to a job at a given startup increases with the proportion of female founders. However, startups with a higher proportion of female founders are not more likely than other startups to favor female candidates in personnel selection.

Human resource management is an understudied but burgeoning topic in the family business scholarly domain. This chapter provides a summary review of the existing literature on human resource management in family businesses and offers pathways for future research. The authors cluster the extant research into topic areas of compensation, recruitment and selection, training, employee performance, and turnover, and offer future research directions for each. In identifying gaps and tension in the literature, the chapter also highlights several broader theoretical pathways for future research. These opportunities include further inquiry into the outcomes of bifurcation bias, or the disparate treatment between family and non-family employees, the nuanced ways family firms recruit and select new employees, the role of high-performance work systems in family firms, the ways image considerations influence human resource practices in family firms, and the application of social network perspectives.

This paper applies marketing concepts to the recruitment research literature in order to develop the concept of employer knowledge, or the beliefs that a job seeker holds about a potential employer. Job seekers' employer knowledge creates value for an organization because it determines how they pursue and process information about the organization, whether they accept jobs with the organization, what they expect from the organization as new employees, and whether they purchase products and services from the firm in the future. Drawing on the marketing literature, this paper: (1) differentiates the dimensions of employer knowledge, (2) describes the sources of employer knowledge and how these information sources are processed by job seekers, and (3) describes how and why job seekers' employer knowledge represents a valuable asset to organizations. The discussion illustrates the implications of the model for recruitment researchers and managers, and suggests new perspectives and research directions that emerge from integrating of marketing and recruiting literatures.