Identifying and prioritizing determinants of employer branding

The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to investigate and identify the determinants of employer branding, and second, as not all determinants are equally relevant, to provide an importance matrix of the identified determinants. We extracted 4,08,857 Glassdoor reviews of companies in the "Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For" 2022 list. We follow a three-phased approach; Phase I involves aspect-based sentiment analysis, Phase II incorporates the grounded theory approach to identify determinants of employer branding, and Phase III introduces the concept of negativity index and associates this and valence with the identified determinants. The study identifies nine determinants of employer branding, and their relative importance towards achieving the same. In addition to reaffirming the determinants identified in the literature over a single data source for the first time, this study identifies Organizational Rightsizing (ORS) as a new determinant of employer branding. The study provides a toolkit for HR practitioners to identify the current status of, and implement corrective measures to, strengthen their employer branding. A strong employer brand not only helps organizations retain their existing workforce but also attracts new talent. The study overviews the state of the art of employer branding and makes three novel contributions. First, the study identifies the determinants of employer branding. Second, it is among the first to associate determinants with their relative importance in establishing employer branding. Third, the concept of the negativity index introduced herein has been used to ascertain the current state of the organizational employer branding and this metric can be used in future studies to compare sentiments of various data sources over a uniform bound linear scale.