The Effects of Company Recruitment Practices on Job Seekers’ Perceived Employment Brand Equity and Intentions to Pursue Job Opportunities

[Excerpt] The early phase of recruitment is essential to staffing success: larger applicant pools permit managers to be more selective when making job offers and increase the overall utility of selection systems (Murphy, 1986). Despite the importance of this early stage of recruitment, little is known about how early recruitment practices affect potential applicants’ intentions and decisions to pursue job opportunities (Breaugh & Starke, 2000). In addition, existing research on the first phase of recruitment is limited because most recruitment research has only concentrated on a small range of recruitment practices that are typically deployed during later phases of recruitment like the job interview (Rynes, 1991). The purpose of this paper is to use the brand-equity literature as a conceptual framework for exploring how a company’s mix of recruitment activities affects job seekers’ perceived employment brand equity and their intentions to pursue job opportunities.