Employer branding via Social Network sites - a Silver Bullet to Attract IT Professionals?

Due to a shortage of IT professionals, many companies intensify their efforts to be perceived as attractive employers in this field, especially by means of social network sites (SNS) such as Facebook. However, it is unknown whether these presences do really attract IT professionals, and if so, whether this is more due to the utilitarian (job search related) characteristics or to the hedonic (entertaining) characteristics of the SNS. In our study, we compared the usage behavior of IT graduates with that of a different group of graduates (in this case: humanities graduates). Our results reveal that corporate SNS presences are suitable to effectively attract IT professionals. Our study proves that the usage behavior of IT graduates is predominantly driven by utilitarian aspects of the SNS presences, while we could verify that humanities graduates use such SNS presences predominantly for entertainment purposes. Therefore, it seems advisable that companies choose the design for their SNS presence with particular regard to the target group that they want to attract and recruit.