Identifying and prioritizing strategies of employer branding: Mixed Approach

Nowadays, as every organization creates a brand for its products or services, it should also make a reliable brand for itself as an employer. Because of the employees are the internal customers of the organization, it is vital the organization makes an attractive brand to attract or retain them. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to identify the employer's branding strategies in the organization and prioritize them based on a descriptive-exploratory method. The statistical population in qualitative phase includes academic experts and human resource managers and in quantitative phase, some managers and defense industry experts. The data were collected by literature review and field methods (semi-structured interview and expert- based questionnaire in 7-point likert scale). The data were analyzed in the qualitative phase with thematic analysis and in the quantitative phase with the multi-criteria decision-making based on the gray numbers theory. The qualitative findings identified two general strategies (internal and external strategies) for employer branding in the organization. In addition, the quantitative findings demonstrated that work-life balance (K= 0.687) has the highest priority among the intra-organizational strategies as well as making social network in the virtual space (K= 0.430) among the extra-organizational strategies.