Employer brand management: methodological aspects

Abstract

The paper aims to develop applied aspects of the methodological support of a reasonable selection of the company responsible for the formation and promotion of the employer brand using the tools of multicriteria analysis and evaluation of the functionality of outsourcing companies based on the criteria that determine their competitive advantage. Consequently, the need to attract external resources to manage the employer brand has been substantiated. The authors schematized the decision-making process on a reasonable selection of outsourcing companies. The system of the criteria for the implementation of such a choice, which includes the requirements for both the outsourcing company and the future project: the rate of successful previous projects, the rate of customer satisfaction, the experience of work in Ukraine, the average cost of project development services, project development duration, the comprehensiveness of the developed recommendations for the employer brand promotion, project duration, project flexibility, the complexity level of project implementation, average monthly expenditures during the project period has been formed. Moreover, the paper systematizes the main metrics of outsourcing companies' projects on the employer brand formation and promotion, which include: a range of services for attracting, selecting, retaining, developing and evaluating staff; competitor analysis, HR-advertising, HR-marketing, systems of search engine management, leadership development programs, adaptation programs; differentiation of those organizational metrics that distinguish the customer company as an employer from the nearest competitors and separation of competitive advantages of the customer, values and the emotional component of the brand; development of its unique brand identification system – corporate style, brand book, etc.; formation of the key employer branding metrics: Employer Value Proposition (EVP), Employer Brand Personality, Employer Brand Positioning; insight formation - deep understanding of the relationship between the brand and the target audience, positioning and repositioning the employer brand on the labour market. The outsourcing company's direct selection is proposed to be based on multicriteria optimization, particularly using the analytical hierarchy methods (Saati, T.) to determine the weight coefficients of criteria and VIKOR to construct the resulting indicator. Thus, the method application result is to make justified ratings of outsourcing companies, which will allow customer companies to choose the best alternatives on the market of outsourcing services.