Appearance or reality? Monitoring of employer branding in public network space: the Glassdoor case.

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To what extent does Employer Branding (EB) express the real-life company working environment or merely constitutes a well-orchestrated organizational image? After reconstructing its significance and impact on the managing of the human resource cycle (recruitment, commitment, and retention) this study describes three ways of monitoring EB: internal, professional and public control. They each make use of a variety of tools in order to assess the extent to which the appearance of the employer corresponds to an authentic reality. Then, there is a presentation of the features and critical issues of a case of public EB control: Glassdoor.com. More specifically, this is followed by descriptions of the structure, services and critical implications of the crowdsourcing-based platform of Glassdoor.com (retaliatory, improper, frivolous and illusionistic utilizations). Implications which may affect the platform’s validity as a monitoring tool of EB. The article ends with several considerations regarding the use of the site as a research-tool. Research sources: literature reviews, Glassdoor-site analysis, specialized web-journals, social-media, studies that used Glassdoor for research purposes. Method: theoretical and empirical data-processing.