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Article Excerpt
In recent years, researchers have directed their attention to potential applicants' attraction to organizations as employers in early recruitment stages (Barber, 1998; Cable & Graham, 2000; Cable & Turban, 2001; Carlson, Connerley, & Mecham, 2002; Collins & Stevens, 2002; Highhouse, Zickar, Thorsteinson, Stierwalt, & Slaughter, 1999; Lievens & Highhouse, 2003; Turban, 2001). According to Barber (1998), early recruitment stages are characterized by an extensive search and screening, the gathering of rudimentary information about multiple opportunities, and little or no personal contact between the parties involved (e.g. people have not been interviewed by the organization). Recent recruitment research has confirmed the key role of potential applicants' impressions of organizations as employers early in the recruitment process. Evidence has been found that impressions of an organization as an employer measured in early recruitment stages are strong predictors of applicants' attraction measured in later recruitment stages, for example, after a campus interview (Turban, Forret, & Hendrickson, 1998), which in turn is related to applicants' final job acceptance decisions (Powell, 1991; Powell & Goulet, 1996).
Despite the importance of applicants' early impressions of organizations as employers, the content or basis of these impressions has remained virtually unexplored (Barber, 1998; Cable & Graham, 2000; Cable & Turban, 2001; Highhouse & Hoffman, 2001; Rynes, 1991). Therefore, Cable and Turban (2001) draw upon conceptualizations of brand knowledge to develop a model of employer knowledge. According to Cable and Turban, the dimensions of employer knowledge play a central role because what people know or think they know about an organization influences to a great extent how they respond to the given employer in the various recruitment phases (see also Collins & Stevens, 2002). Applicants' employer knowledge also has key ramifications for recruitment theory and practice because 'without mapping and understanding the concept of applicants' employer knowledge, it is difficult to advance theory regarding how, why, and when recruitment influences applicants and what ... recruitment strategies need to be enacted to maximize recruitment competitiveness' (Cable & Turban, 2001, p. 118).
Therefore, in this study, the dimensions of employer knowledge serve as a common and integrative framework to formulate hypotheses about factors affecting the attractiveness of one specific kind of organization as a place to work, namely the armed forces. This military context is relevant because military organizations typically employ a large number of people. For instance, in 2004 there were more than 200,000 people working for the British Army and more than 40,000 for the Belgian Army. Moreover, the armed forces are amongst the organizations that increasingly face difficulties in attracting and enlisting new recruits (Bachman, Segal, Freedman-Doan, & O'Malley, 2000; Knowles et al., 2002). In many European countries, the importance of attracting new recruits has also been bolstered by the transition to a voluntary military service (Lescreve, 2000; Matser, 2001). However, prior research on military propensity and enlistment of high school seniors has focused on demographic, biographic, educational, and family background factors and attitudes about military service (Bachman et al., 2000; Martin, 1995), ignoring the specific determinants of high school seniors' perceived attraction to military organizations as an employer.
Theoretical background
Cable and Turban (2001) define employer knowledge as a job seeker's memories and associations regarding an organization as a (potential) employer. Thus, employer knowledge provides applicants with a template to categorize, store, and recall employer-related information. Consistent with conceptualizations of brand image (see Aaker, 1991; Keller, 1993), Cable and Turban (2001) differentiate between three broad dimensions of employer knowledge: employer familiarity, employer image, and employer reputation. These related dimensions are posited to influence applicants' attraction to an organization as a place to work. Therefore, in this study, we focus on the effects of these three employer knowledge dimensions on initial perceptions of organizational attractiveness. In addition, we try to determine the relative importance of each dimension in determining an organization's attractiveness and examine how familiarity interacts with the other two dimensions. Below we discuss each of the
employer knowledge dimensions and their expected effects. It should be noted that Cable and Turban's theory is broader than the effects tested in this study. For example, Cable and Turban posit various antecedents that might influence the three employer knowledge dimensions. They also incorporate a person-organization fit perspective (e.g. Kristof, 1996) and posit that applicants' values and needs will moderate the effects of the employer knowledge dimensions on organizational attractiveness. However, these other components of Cable and Turban's theory are not examined in the current study.
The first dimension is employer familiarity or the level of awareness that a job seeker has of an organization (Cable & Turban, 2001; Collins & Stevens, 2002). Generally, previous studies in the recruitment field have demonstrated that an organization's overall familiarity is related to applicants' perceptions of a company's attractiveness as an employer, with more familiar organizations being perceived as more attractive (Cable & Graham, 2000; Gatewood, Gowan, & Lautenschlager, 1993; Turban, 2001; Turban & Greening, 1997; for a divergent view see Brooks, Highhouse, Russell, & Mohr, 2003). In a similar vein, in the marketing literature, brand familiarity or brand awareness has been found to be an important anchor to which other information is attached (Aaker, 1991; Keller, 1993). Theoretical evidence for the importance of familiarity also comes from the social psychological literature on 'mere exposure' indicating that increased familiarity with previously neutral objects leads to an increase in liking (Bornstein, 1989; Zajonc, 1968). Given this theoretical and empirical evidence about the role of familiarity, we formulate the following hypothesis.
Hypothesis 1. Familiarity with the armed forces as an employer will be positively related to the perceived attractiveness of the armed forces as an employer.
Employer image represents the second dimension of employer knowledge. This dimension pertains to the content of the beliefs that applicants have about the organization as an employer (Cable & Turban, 2001; Highhouse et al., 1999). Specifically, Cable and Turban (2001) argue that potential applicants hold beliefs about objective aspects of the organization (employer information), varying from factual or historical aspects of organizations to organizational procedures and policies. Examples of employer information are size, location, level of centralization or geographical dispersion. Additionally, Cable and Turban (2001) posit that potential applicants have some knowledge about the attributes of a specific job at the organization to which they might consider applying (job information). Examples of job information are pay, benefits, type of work to be performed or advancement opportunities. Lievens and Highhouse (2003) refer to many job and organizational attributes as instrumental attributes because they describe the job or organization in terms of objective, concrete, and factual attributes that a job or an organization either has or does not have.
The few studies that have examined potential applicants' attraction in early recruitment stages have confirmed that organizational attraction is influenced by applicants' perceptions of job or organizational characteristics such as pay, opportunities for advancement, location, career programmes, or organizational structure (Cable & Graham, 2000; Highhouse et al., 1999; Honeycutt & Rosen, 1997; Lievens, Decaesteker, Coetsier, & Geirnaert, 2001; Lievens & Highhouse, 2003; Turban & Keon, 1993). In this study, we expect that the results found in the personnel recruitment literature will generalize to a military context. Therefore, we expect that perceptions of job and organizational attributes will play a significant role in people's attraction to the armed forces, as reflected in the following hypothesis.
Hypothesis 2. Perceptions of job and organizational attributes of the armed forces will be positively associated with the perceived attractiveness of the armed forces as an employer.
The third dimension in Cable and Turban's (2001) framework of employer knowledge refers to employer reputation or the public evaluation of an organization. Although employer reputation is often cast in economic terms (Fombrun & Shanley, 1990), some recent studies provide an interesting new trait-oriented perspective to employer reputation (Lievens & Highhouse, 2003; Slaughter, Zickar, Highhouse, & Mohr, 2004). In particular, these studies reveal that potential applicants reliably and meaningfully ascribe traits to organizations. For example, people refer to some employing organizations as trendy, whereas other employing organizations are seen as prestigious. Trait inferences about organizations are different from the aforementioned job and employer information for two reasons. First, they describe the organization in terms of subjective, abstract, and intangible attributes. Second, they convey symbolic company information in the form of imagery that applicants assign to organizations (Lievens & Highhouse, 2003).
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