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The purpose of this paper is to review the existing literature linked to the emerging field of employer branding, with a view to adding insight from the perspective of the management of human resources.

The approach taken entails reviewing books and academic journals from the area of marketing, organisational behaviour (OB) and business management. The review shows that research and theory from a range of fields can help add to one's knowledge of employer branding; these include areas of research that investigate organisational attractiveness to potential new recruits, research and writing linked to the psychological contract literature as well as work that examines organisational identity, organisational identification and organisational personality characteristics.

The main limitation of the review is that, while different areas and fields of research are being drawn on to help identify useful knowledge that can improve one's understanding of what effective employer branding might involve, the literature and research in each area will be (necessarily) selective.

The review has a number of general practical implications; many of these are highlighted in the propositions set out within each section.

The originality of the review is that it is unique in showing how different areas of literature can be linked to employer branding. The review helps to integrate the existing literature in a way which can help personnel practitioners to immediately see the relevance of theories and research from a range of key academic fields.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a new data source available for researchers with interest in human resources management (HRM) and personnel economics, the Linked Personnel Panel (LPP).

The LPP is a longitudinal and representative employer-employee data set covering establishments in Germany and a subset of their workforce and is designed for quantitative empirical human resource research.

The LPP employee survey applies a number of established scales to measure job characteristics and job perceptions, personal characteristics, employee attitudes towards the organization and employee behaviour. This paper gives an overview of both the employer and employee survey and outlines the definitions, origins, and statistical properties of the scales used in the individual questionnaire.

The paper describes how researchers can access the data.

First, the data set combines employer and employee surveys that can be matched to each other. Second, it can also be linked to a number of additional administrative data sets. Third, the LPP covers a wide range of firms and workers from different backgrounds. Finally, because of its longitudinal dimension, the LPP should facilitate the study of causal effects of HRM practices.

Purpose – I suggest that we conceptualize labor markets as observable social networks, in which workplaces are the nodes and people moving between workplaces are the edges. The movement of people delivers the actionable information as to what the supply, demand, and going wage for labor might be. Labor market networks are hypothesized to be quite thin thus leading to substantial wage setting autonomy within workplaces, consistent with contemporary observations in both economics and sociology as to the weakness of labor market signals.Method – This paper reviews theoretical and empirical work in economics, sociology, and network science and develops a network image of labor market structure and function. Hypotheses derived from economic, sociological, and network theories are proposed to explain workplace-level wage setting.Findings – Information flow, trust in information, information variance, collusion, and status beliefs are all proposed as important network properties of labor markets. The paper outlines an observational strategy to make labor markets scientifically observable.Originality – Economists and sociologists often refer to labor markets as mechanisms setting the price of labor but rarely observe them. This paper outlines a strategy for making the invisible hand of the market scientifically observable.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the role of employers as “institutional” factors in the creation of segmentation in the labour market. Industrial structure defines segments of the labour market (the employer) based on the nature of demand, and with the impact on the individual workers or groups based on their personal characteristics.

Empirical work is within the Dublin labour market, which experienced the largest increase in availability of migrant workers under immigration policies of the Celtic Tiger state. Focused on the sectors of catering, cleaning and security as low‐skilled service sector providers, the analysis is based on 24 semi‐structured interviews with employers selected based on a database of a cross‐section of all employers in the selected sectors in Dublin.

Semi‐structured interviews reinforce state policies as key institutional factor underlying migrant labour trends and experiences, but perspectives of the employers in low‐end service industries reveal additional insights. In addition to using migrant labour as a means of cost cutting, the daily actions of employers reveal cultural stereotyping of workers, making them an elemental component “exploiting” the trends facilitated by state immigration policies.

Although a large body of research on migration into Ireland during the Celtic Tiger years is available, little of it has focused on labour market processes. More broadly, in attempting to understand labour market processes and the creation of segmentation there needs to be a triangulation of processes of supply, demand and state policies; and employers are key players in shaping demand and exploiting supply trends.

This paper describes a research project that involved an in‐depth investigation into freelancing in the public relations industry with data collected from both freelancers and their employers. The analysis of these data highlighted the complexity of issues for those working in and employing people in this sector of public relations practice. The research project produced data on themes relating to freelance practitioners’ status, skills and experience, but this paper aims to focus specifically on trends and issues for the future. The key findings under this theme are that the freelance sector has grown. A majority of clients claim an increased use of freelancers in the last year and this was linked to a “need for flexibility” and “new business development”. Also the majority of freelancers are happy and do not want to change their employment status and some respondents stated “nothing” would make them return to permanent employment. Freelance public relations appears to be meeting a trend since the early 1990s for companies to “downsize” and “outsource” workers and for employees to seek a work/lifestyle balance. Regarding patterns of work almost half of freelancers claimed to be more productive when freelancing with the key factors being that they have “fewer interruptions” and fewer “unnecessary meetings”. Of relevance to national institutes and debates about professionalisation and reputation, it was interesting that the majority of the sample were not members of a professional body. The research and its findings have implications for human resources managers employing public relations staff, public relations managers and directors who commission freelance practitioners and the freelancers themselves.

The purpose of this paper is to take into consideration the propensity to offer vocational training of a large sample of Italian private firms by retrieving cross-sectional data from INDACO (2009).

Estimating a probit model, the author assesses how the age and the gender composition of the employed workforce, as well as a set of relevant corporate characteristics, such as size, sector, geographical location, innovation strategies, R&D investments and use of social safety valves, are linked to the willingness of firms to supply on-the-job training.

First, as far as the average age of the whole employed workforce is concerned, it was found that the propensity of surveyed firms toward training provision follows an inverted U-shaped pattern. Furthermore, it was shown that larger firms have a higher training propensity with respect to small firms, and the same attitude holds for productive units that adopted innovation strategies and/or invested in R&D projects. By contrast, it was found that the propensity to support training activities is negatively correlated to the percentage of employed women and the use social valves.

The sample of business units taken into consideration is quite large, but it has some biases toward larger and manufacturing firms. Moreover, the cross-sectional perspective of the analysis does not allow implementation of the finer identification procedures that can be applied with panel data. Furthermore, the lack of employer – employee linked data does not allow to fully address the issue of compliance to training activities.

From a policy point of view, the results shown throughout the paper suggest some broad guidelines. First, especially in small firms, vocational training for young and older workers should be somehow stimulated. Moreover, as far as mature employees are concerned, those interventions should be framed in an active ageing perspective. Subsidies and targeted job placement programmes are often claimed as being the most appropriate ways to improve the underprivileged position of older workers. However, continuous learning during the whole working life still appears as the most effective device to reduce the employment disadvantages in the older years.

While there are a number of papers that study the age patterns of training participation by using workers’ data retrieved from personnel and/or labour force surveys, this work is the first attempt to provide a probabilistic assessment of the decisions of Italian firms regarding training provision by taking into account the ageing perspectives of the incumbent workforce.