Resumen de Categorizing humorous employer brand message in a small company's online job ads
Eeva-Liisa Oikarinen, Saila Saraniemi
This study creates a framework for defining the employer brand message to understand an understudied phenomenon: how small companies use humour in online job ads. The originality of the framework is based on three issues. First: categorizing employer brand content into symbolic attributes: staff, applicant and other stakeholder, and instrumental attributes: company and job. Second: categorizing humour, informal and formal as communication styles. Third: investigating the thematic relatedness of communication style to employer brand content attributes to understand using humour in employer brand message. Illustrative empirical findings indicated that a small company focused more on symbolic attributes rather than instrumental attributes in its employer brand content. Humour was used typically when it was thematically related to symbolic attributes: applicant or staff. Humour was used less when it was thematically related to instrumental attributes: company and job. A framework offers new insights for researchers in the conceptualizing of the employer brand message. For marketing practitioners, it offers a method for evaluating and planning a company's employer brand message. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
