Development of a scale to measure organizational attractiveness for employer branding in higher education

Abstract

It is the purpose of this paper to explore employer branding in higher education, offering a framework to measure organizational attractiveness in higher education institutions, identifying particular features of employment experience that are most valued, appreciated and significant to their employees. The paper reports the development of Organizational Attractiveness Extraction Scale (OAES) and discusses its application in two Lithuanian higher education institutions, i.e. specialized University (N=117) and technical University (N=269). For data analysis exploratory factor analysis, nonparametric Mann-Whitney U, Wilcoxon and Kendall’s tau criteria were used. The findings suggest that perceived actual and desirable employment experience differentiates between two researched universities as well as presuppose different patterns of organizational attractiveness followed by higher education institutions. Implications and recommendations for the employer brand development in higher education are presented.