Match Me If You Can! Business Graduates’ Engagement with Employer Brands on Social Networking Sites

Sammanfattning: Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to study the gratifications business graduates seek when engaging with employer brands on the Social Networking Sites (SNSs) LinkedIn and Facebook. Research Design – The study is anchored in the Uses and Gratifications (U&G) approach, commonly applied for research on antecedents to engagement through different media. First, a pre-study was carried out in order to validate previously identified gratifications sought from the U&G approach and find potential additional gratifications in the context of employer brands. The main study was an online survey of business graduates studying their final semester, resulting in 122 usable responses from job-seeking business graduates in Sweden. The data was analyzed using multiple regression techniques. Findings –Previous U&G studies contributed with three gratifications sought from engagement in terms of Information, Entertainment and Integration & Social Interaction. The pre-study led to the findings of two additional gratifications relevant for the study’s context of employer brands, namely Strategy and Convenience. All gratifications except Entertainment were tested and recognized as reliable constructs representing the gratifications sought to predict Engagement with Employer brands, although different combinations of the gratifications were seen for LinkedIn and Facebook respectively. Integration & Social Interaction and Strategy predict business graduates’ engagement with employer brands on LinkedIn, whereas Information and Strategy explained engagement on Facebook. Theoretical & Practical Implications – The findings have implications for future research on engagement on social media and the integration of social media into employer branding. Furthermore, the present research contributes with two additional gratifications sought from engagement on social media: Strategy and Convenience. Practically, the findings give ideas about how firms can utilize SNSs as platforms in their employer branding initiatives to encourage engagement from potential employees, as long as they pay attention to the differences in structure and atmosphere characterized by different SNSs.