Employer attractiveness: Measurement scale development and validation

Abstract

Human resource quality is one important factor that affects the success of each organization. The need to build a human resource foundation with knowledge, skills and good attitude is one urgent task for all business leaders. The first task is to attract and recruit excellent individuals to work for the business; therefore, how to attract candidates is always academic researchers’ as well as business managers’ top priority. Employer attractiveness factor (Berthon, Ewing, & Hah, 2005) has been applied in some recent studies. However, because talent recruitment and attraction are diverse and different for individual organizations, cultures and countries, the scale of employer attractiveness concept still implies many points that are not appropriate for Vietnamese contexts. This research, based on the social exchange theory and the employer branding theory, develops in great details and confirms the employer attractiveness scale in Vietnamese business. The mixed-method (interviewing 4 experts and 2 staff in-depth groups as well as surveying quantitatively 937 employees working for Vietnamese enterprises) has been applied. The research results determine the employer attractiveness dimension factor comprising social value, development value, application value, safety value and economic value. This research has discovered a new factor of employer attractiveness scale: safety value.