eThesis - School of Business electronic theses

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Existing international studies have shown that Employer Branding is becoming an important element when companies are trying to differentiate themselves in the eyes of potential employees. In Finland research data about the state of Employer Branding is not available. Thus, the primary contribution of this thesis to the current knowledge of the topic is to find out the position of Employer Branding in Finnish companies today.

The empirical part of the study is based on data collected in a web survey conducted in November 2008 - February 2009. The survey was created based on existing Employer Branding literature and total sampling frame consisted of 190 Finnish companies that had a turnover of over 250M€ and more than 250 employees in 2008. In total 45 applicable responses were received representing a response rate of 24 % of the sample.

The results show that Employer Branding does not have a particularly distinct position in large Finnish companies and, thus, respondents felt that Employer Branding should have a more important role than it currently possesses in their companies. In fact, many companies are developing and researching Employer Branding but resources allocated to the processes were not felt to reach an adequate level. Companies headquartered outside of Finland differentiated from these results as in those companies Employer Branding had more importance and adequate resources than in companies headquartered in Finland. Finally, it was found that Employer Branding is still the responsibility of companies’ human resource departments while marketing and PR departments’ role was surprisingly low.