Much Ado About Little: A Critical Review of the Employer Branding Concept

Within the past ten to fifteen years the concept of Employer Branding (EB) has established itself as a widely known and highly regarded concept especially among Human Resource Management practitioners. In many organizations the development, implementation and communication of a distinctive and unique employer brand is meanwhile considered an important building block for gaining a competitive advantage in the so called “war for talent”. The paper at hand aims at critically exploring the conceptual foundations of employer branding by reviewing an extensive body of EB-literature consisting of standard references, scientific journal articles, textbooks as well as practitioner-oriented literature. This review reveals several general weaknesses, discrepancies and “blind spots” which cannot simply be attributed to some few single publications but rather call for a skeptical look upon the whole concept of employer branding itself. In conclusion the authors assert that the employer branding concept widely lacks innovative novelty as well as content-related persuasiveness. It should therefore be regarded as neither more nor less than a contemporary remake of what is and has for quite some time been well known as “Internal Marketing” or “HR Marketing”.