An institutional logics perspective on recruiting

Institutional logics have provided a fruitful theoretical perspective to describe how behavior might be informed by different societal value systems that constitute sets of shared meanings, vocabularies, and legitimate courses of action. This perspective is able to account for situations that are characterized by multiple and potentially conflicting values and to explain organizations reactions to the increasing complexity of their institutional environment. However, scholars have largely neglected individuals reactions to institutional complexity and the connections between individuals and organizations. In contrast, research in human resource management and recruiting has traditionally focused on exactly this connection: the relationship between employing organizations and individual employees. While explaining individuals perceptions and choices, it is, however, for the most part failing to account for the societal and institutional embeddedness of human resource management. In the proposed project, I suggest an institutional logics perspective on recruitment issues and argue that institutional logics connect individual and organizational actors. Sharing the experience of institutional complexity in modern societies, individuals and organizations alike draw on multiple institutional logics to construct their identities and to connect and coordinate with each other. In the context of recruitment, this means companies utilize their organizational identity to present themselves to potential applicants while individuals exert their identity to evaluate specific employers. My research questions explore how organizations and individuals construct their identities and how potential applicants draw on institutional logics when assessing the attractiveness and legitimacy of companies in specific institutional contexts. To answer these research questions, I propose a comparative study in two significantly different national contexts, Spain and Austria, and apply different methods to gain comprehensive insights on recruiting from an institutional logics perspective. In order to study how organizations and individuals draw on institutional logics in their identity construction, I use a qualitative design that includes innovative visual methods for analyzing employer branding materials and semi-structured interviews with both potential applicants and organization representatives. Building on these results, I outline an institutional definition of attraction and quantitatively examine individuals attraction assessment. Viewing institutional logics as connecting organizations and individuals is a unique contribution to advancing the institutional logics perspective, consolidating the hitherto separately studied micro, meso, and macro level. My project also contributes to the development of human resource management research that accounts for the social and institutional embeddedness of practices such as recruiting. Analyzing companies employer branding activities and applicants expectations is not only beneficial for organizations but also for decision makers who want to gain a better understanding of how social developments like labor shortages or job insecurity might influence the perception of organizations as good employers.

Companies need to able to attract and ultimately employ new talents. Recruitment as all the efforts aimed at this goal is therefore crucial for organizations continued existence. With changing ideas about the role and importance of employment for the life of employees and about what makes good employers, it is surprising that recruitment research largely neglected the influences of social trends on recruitment. My research project is based on the assumption that how companies present themselves to interested applicants as well as how these potential applicants view and assess employers is formed by established ideas in society about what employment, employers and employees should be like. The findings of my research address three areas; the messages that companies use to address applicants, the process how individuals make sense of these messages and the specific context in which such a communication between employers and applicants might take place. First, I was specifically interested in how messages that companies use in their employer branding material (e.g. job advertisements) draw on verbal text and pictures in order communicate that the company is an attractive employer. I found that these messages aim at either creating an image of the employer as attractive, legitimate or relatable in the sense of applicants being able to identify with the company. To do this, companies refer to values that society in general believes in, but these values change over time and therefore require an adjustment of messages in employer branding material. Second, I tried to understand how applicants view employer branding material. Drawing on the example of women planning a career in the field of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), my research was able to show that applicants view employment as an opportunity for their continuous development of their career and life goals. This notion of identity project is the basis that serves applicants to assess whether an employer as portrayed in their employer branding material might support their goal achievement. Understanding these processes is especially pressing in an environment such as STEM where the realization of the females identity projects is often impeded by discrimination and strict gender norms. Third, I addressed how companies can, through recruitment and employment, respond to the current challenge of forced migration, which Europe has faced during the duration of my research project in the form of a massive influx of refugees. In this particular context, in which communication between employers and applicants might take place on specific online platforms and job fairs, it is important to look at the different stakeholders, their varying interests, interpretations and evaluation criteria and how they draw on discourses and legitimations that society provides in the form of taken-for-granted assumptions. This research project therefore also has social implications.