Winning the War for Talent: Back to Basics

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Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1979145 Winning the War for Talent: Back to Basics 1 PAT AUGER ([email protected]) Melbourne Business School Carlton, VIC 3083 AUSTRALIA TIMOTHY M. DEVINNEY ([email protected]) GRAHAME R. DOWLING ([email protected]) CHRISTINE ECKERT ([email protected]) Faculty of Business University of Technology, Sydney Haymarket, NSW 2007 AUSTRALIA NIDTHIDA LIN ([email protected]) School of Marketing University of Western Sydney Penrith, NSW 2751 AUSTRALIA

Transcript of Winning the War for Talent: Back to Basics

Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1979145

Winning the War for Talent: Back to Basics1

PAT AUGER ([email protected])

Melbourne Business School Carlton, VIC 3083 AUSTRALIA

TIMOTHY M. DEVINNEY ([email protected])

GRAHAME R. DOWLING ([email protected])

CHRISTINE ECKERT ([email protected])

Faculty of Business University of Technology, Sydney

Haymarket, NSW 2007 AUSTRALIA

NIDTHIDA LIN ([email protected])

School of Marketing University of Western Sydney

Penrith, NSW 2751 AUSTRALIA

Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1979145

The War for Talent Page 1

Winning the War for Talent: Back to Basics

McKinsey & Company claim to have coined the term the war for talent in 1997.2 The idea

still resonates with managers because it reflects the fact that talented people are a critical

driver of corporate success. For those involved in this “war”, the search continues for fresh

ideas about: (a) how to make the recruiting process more desirable, (b) what mix of

organizational and job attributes will attract talented people, (c) how to develop more

talented managers, and (d) how to design of an attractive workplace environment that

retains such people.

To better understand these issues academics and consultants routinely conduct

surveys of talented employees.3 For example, in 2008 the recruiting consultants Hill &

Knowlton published “Reputation & the War for Talent”4 a survey of 527 MBA students in

12 top business schools in the United States, Europe and Asia. Not surprisingly given the

title of their report, they found that 96% of these students said that reputation was an

important factor in their choice of potential employer. A majority also said that career

opportunities, corporate culture, compensation and benefits, the quality of the company’s

products and services, its financial performance, growth potential, corporate governance

and ethics were also important.

Recently, the idea has emerged that the key to winning the talent war is to place

greater emphasis on aspects of the social reputation of an organization, not just the

corporate and workplace aspects of this reputation.5 For example, consider the following

quotation from a global HR consultancy when reporting the findings of their latest survey:6

Major public issues such as a company’s reputation for strong ethical practices have become critical factors in choosing where to work, even to the point where many employees are prepared to sacrifice pay or promotion in order to work for organizations that are actively engaged in good social responsibility practices. More specifically, concerns about ethical behavior outweigh concerns about the environment by all generations, when making employment choices.

Such sentiment implies that emphasizing the firm’s social reputation over more utilitarian

factors of a job contract is the best strategy to win the war for talent.7

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We believe that statements like the one above are too simplistic because they are

derived from research that does not reflect the complex nature of the decisions that

potential employees make about job choices. Few studies validly examine the degree to

which social reputation or its counterparts are more important than other more utilitarian

job choice factors. Hence, the usefulness of these surveys as a guide for winning the war

for talent is limited. In fact, relying on such studies will often lead to an unnecessary

investment in social reputation building and result in faulty human resource recruitment

practices.

We make this criticism because the opinion surveys of most consultants do not

require respondents to make the realistic trade-off decisions offered to them in a job choice

situation. For example, choosing amongst job offers requires individuals to trade off more

of some factors such as salary, leave entitlements, and travel demands against less of other

factors such as promotion opportunities and pension contributions. In realistic job offers

no employer offers the best of everything. When a survey task simply asks people to rate

the importance of a laundry list of job attributes it hides the marginal value of each

attribute to the potential employee. Thus, the surveys from which the preceding

recommendations were derived fail to adequately take into account the actual decision

making process that a potential employee uses when making their job choice.

To substantiate our criticism we report two job choice studies – one with a sample of

MBA students and the other with white-collar office workers. Here we systematically

analyze the degree to which potential and actual employees trade off the utilitarian and

reputation components of job contracts. What this allows us to do is calibrate the relative

importance of three types of reputation against more basic aspects of workplace terms and

conditions. We do this in a way that provides a dollar estimate of the value of each feature

of the job and type of reputation. Details of the study are given in the appendix. After we

describe why corporate reputations are valuable in job choice settings, we summarize the

major findings of our studies and draw out their managerial implications.

The Role of Reputation

A typical job offer is composed of a mix of features about the job and the employer. For

example, reputation is an employer feature that acts to dispel some of the uncertainty

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and/or risk associated with various ‘promises’ that are embedded in some job features,

such as the opportunity for promotion, access to senior management, a future overseas

posting, et cetera. In this way an organization’s reputation provides source credibility to

many of the features offered in a job contract. Thus, when organizations compete for

talented employees by offering similar job features, those with ‘good’ reputations should

have a better chance of attracting these people.

Because reputation is a somewhat malleable construct, we create three versions,

namely, corporate, workplace, and social. Corporate reputation is the overall recognition

and respect in which the organization is held. Workplace and social reputation are specific

versions of this respect. Using three types of reputation in a job choice study serves two

purposes. First, it provides reputation with the maximum chance to have some significant

effect on making a job offer more attractive to talented employees. Because, as the title of

this paper suggests, we are questioning some strongly-held beliefs about the role and

potency of reputation in the management and HR literatures, we are careful not to mask

the potential effects of reputation.

Second, having more than one type of reputation allows us to understand better how

different reputations are used by potential and current employees to fortify their choices.

For example, one or more types of reputation may be used as an initial screening feature

such that a potential employer with a poor reputation may be deemed to be unsuitable

regardless of what other features are offered. In this case, we expect to find that one or

more types of reputation are very important relative to all the other features of the job

offer. Alternatively, reputation may play a second-order role. Here, other job features

dominate but reputation serves to ‘break the tie’ between two similar job offers. This tie-

break function will be revealed when a good reputation entices the employee to accept a

similar job offer, or a bad reputation dissuades the employee. Finally, reputation may be

irrelevant. Here we would observe that across a wide range of job offers no type of

reputation really matters. As noted later, the managerial implications for job contract

design across these three outcomes are very different.

To control for the fact that the relative importance of job features and types of

reputation may vary across different types of people and contexts of their employment, we

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examined multiple groups of employees. And to ensure that a single measure of the job

features did not contaminate our findings we used different measurement methods.

Consultants never build these controls into their surveys.

Respondents & Job Offers

The first study examined how 303 MBA/EMBA students chose amongst 16 pairs of

experimentally designed job offers. It was conducted by two business school placement

services. The second study examined how 1,189 white-collar office workers chose amongst

16 pairs of experimentally designed job offers. It was conducted by a market research

organization. Half the white-collar individuals were currently in regular employment and

not looking to change jobs, while the other half were in irregular part time work or

unemployed and seeking employment opportunities. In both studies each participant

answered a series of questions on their background (Table 1) and what they wanted from a

job and employer – a survey similar to those discussed at the beginning of this article.

They were then asked to choose amongst pairs of experimentally designed job offers similar

to those shown in Table 2. This task is known as a discrete choice that forces the

respondent to make trade offs across the job features.

Insert Tables 1 & 2 about here

Will ingness to Pay for a Good Reputation

Given that our primary focus is on the reputation components of a job offer, we highlight

these features relative to the others in the job contract. Note how that in Table 2 we tell

respondents that the reputation of the employer is rated above or below its peers by a well-

known ratings agency (Table 2). These external evaluations of reputation are

commonplace.8 The agencies and many commentators think that they play an important

role in conferring legitimacy and many firms actively compete to be in the rated set of

firms. Also, because the employment contracts presented to respondents include a dollar

amount for salary the statistical modeling approach described in the Appendix allows us to

estimate each individual participant’s willingness-to-pay (WTP) for these reputation ratings

and the other features of the job offer. These WTP estimates are the percentage of the

total value of the job offer respondents are willing to sacrifice to get the best of one feature

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(such as a top rated corporate reputation) as against the total dollar value of the other

features. Finally, by forcing people to choose a contract from each of the 16 pairs offered

(Questions 1 and 2 at the bottom of Table 2) we can examine the degree to which each

feature influenced this choice.

Table 3 presents the average WTP estimates as a percentage of the total value of the

job contract package for each of the groups. These estimates show that there is

considerable heterogeneity across the importance of the various job features. They also

reveal that although reputation seems to matter, the degree to which it matters varies

considerably, and for the most part this value is moderate with respect to more utilitarian

aspects of the work and employment conditions. For MBAs, salary, time demands, salary

certainty (bonus) and promotion opportunities account for the top 55.6% of the value of

the contract. For employed white-collar workers, salary, time demands and salary certainty

(bonus) account for 53.3% of the value of the contract. For under/unemployed white-

collar workers, time demands, salary certainty (bonus) and the need to not relocated

account for 51.3% of the value of the contract.

Regarding the importance of reputation, Table 3 shows:

For MBAs, corporate reputation accounts for 7.5% of the value of the job contracts

on offer, workplace reputation 5.6% and social reputation 3.2%. In total, reputation

accounts for 16.3% of the value of the contract. When converted to an estimate of

(the average) salary (contained in the various job offers) this amounts to a dollar

value of $12,388 for corporate reputation, $9,249 for workplace reputation, and

$5,286 for social reputation.

For the white-collar employed, reputation has less importance – in total 12.2% of the

value of the contract. Corporate reputation accounts for 3.4% of the total value of

the contracts on offer, workplace reputation 3.8% and social reputation 5.0%. For

these workers this amounts to a dollar value of $2,382 for corporate reputation,

$2,662 for workplace reputation, and $3,503 for social reputation; for a total value of

$8,547.

For the under/unemployed workers, reputation has a total importance of 12.3% of

the value of the contract. Workplace reputation is the most important accounting

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for 5.4%, then corporate reputation at 4.1%, and finally social reputation at 2.8%.

For these workers the dollar estimates are lower than for the other white-collar

workers because they based on lower expectations of salary or a lower salary in their

last position. Corporate reputation is valued at $1,785, workplace reputation at

$2,351, and social reputation at $1,219; for a total value of $5,355.

One way to put these numbers in perspective is to consider that because the MBA

employment contract contained 15 features we would expect that if each feature was

chosen at random, it would account for 6.7% of the total importance. Thus, when the

combined reputation importance is less than 20%, as it is for this group, these features are

not very important. In the case of the white-collar workers, their employment contracts

contained 17 features (Table 3). Thus, when the total importance is less than17.6%, as it is

here, reputation is again relatively unimportant.

Insert Table 3 about here

Notwithstanding the relative unimportance of reputation, a second analysis illustrates

how being certified by an external ratings agency has a tie-break role for employee job

contract choice. Figure 1 presents the impact of different levels of acclaim on the choice of

a job contract. What is generalizable from the three graphs is that most of the impact of

reputation is found at the extremes. Individuals are influenced positively by a very good

reputation and negatively by a very bad reputation. However, as evidenced by the

difference between the highest and lowest coefficients, the effects are much stronger for the

corporate and workplace reputations than for social reputation. In the case of workplace

reputation, the effects of certification are mixed. Here, simply being known locally as a

good employer is often enough to induce contract choice, all other things being equal.

Looking across the groups in each panel of Figure 1 shows that the patterns seen for both

the MBAs and the white-collar workers are remarkably similar in terms of their form.

Where there are differences, they arise mainly in terms of the magnitudes of the effects and

how they are distributed over the aspects of reputation.

Insert Figure 1 about here

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The Role of Reputation in the War for Talent

From a managerial perspective a number of implications arise from our findings:

For potential executive employees, the MBA and EMBA students – the value of all

three types of reputation is insignificant in comparison to those facets of the job

contract that are material to their career – salary and compensation, promotion

opportunities, time and travel demands, and so on. These talented employees want

to work for good employers but they do not have to be award winners. In particular,

our MBA students pay little attention to the social reputation of the company. For

these individuals it is much more about “show us a career” and “give us a return on

our education investment”. Thus, employers would waste their resources following

the advice of many HR consultants if they invested directly in creating a better social

reputation.

While our white-collar workers who are gainfully employed are more eclectic in terms

of their valuations of job features than the other groups, their reaction to reputation

is similar to the MBA students. Again, it is the extremes that matter as a tiebreaker

when other aspects of a job offer are similar. In this case, a bad workplace or social

reputation matters a little. However, it is not important enough for employers to

make a substantial investment in improving this aspect of the corporate behavior.

In some respects white-collar workers currently seeking employment are in a “beggars

can’t be choosers” situation. Thus, it is not surprising that they are not overly

concerned about reputation. Again, it is the utilitarian aspects of the job offer that

motivates their choice. Thus, direct investment in reputation building would be a

waste of resources relative to maximizing the benefits derived from the basic features

of the job.

Across all three groups the only advice that accurately reflects the results of our

studies is to build on the basics. That is, to attract talented employees create good job

offers designed primarily around compensation, time demands, and promotion

opportunities. Then, and only then, differentiate the organization on reputation. We

believe that good reputations flow from being commercially successful, an in an

employment context a key part of this involves making good job offers and providing good

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working conditions. Trying to artificially engineer a good social reputation through other

means is likely to be a sideshow to these endeavors.

Does It Real ly Matter How You Ask People What Real ly Matters?

A skeptical reader might ask if our conclusions depend on our methodology. The answer

is yes. And to show how this matters Figure 2 profiles what our respondents said mattered

to them when we used the type of questioning technique typically used in surveys by

consultants. We asked our participants a battery of questions taken from well-established

surveys. Their task was to tell us what aspects of the employer or the job they “valued”

based upon a number of 5-point Likert scales that varied from “absolutely critical” (5)

through “relevant” (3) and down to “completely irrelevant” (1).

Insert Figure 2 about here

What Figure 2 reveals is that nearly every characteristic of the company and the job is

relevant or very relevant to the individual’s choice of job or company. The mean responses

are 3.52 across all 13 company characteristic questions and 3.68 across the 15 job

characteristics questions (with no material difference across the groups). In essence, with

the exception of three company characteristic questions – “Physical surroundings”,

“Emphasis on community an inclusion” and “Opinions of others” – all three groups view

every other characteristic as “relevant to their decision to choose a job or employing

company”. In the case of the job characteristics again only three questions fall into the

marginally relevant range for the three groups – “Opportunity to work or travel in a foreign

country,” “Ability to make a social contribution” and “Stock option or ownership

program”. Everything else appears to matter.

But, as we noted earlier, when there is no ‘cognitive cost’ to saying that something

does not matter, then most people err on the side of caution and say that it does. When

we impose a cognitive cost on the respondent by making them assess each job offer across

all its key features simultaneously, and then choose one, we get a clear picture of what is

manifestly important, and what is marginally so. Which set of results appeals to you

depends on whether you think that a choice-based task is better than a simple ratings task

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in eliciting from people what really matters to them when they actually have to make a

choice. From the point of view of an HR manager, we suggest that when faced with the

task of designing job offers on the basis of the results in Table 3 or Figure 2, they are likely

to come up with quite different types of offers.

Winning the War: Go Back to Basics

We began our discussion with a breathless press release about how a reputation for “doing

good” mattered in the war for talent. The results of our research suggest that an offer

based on fundamental job features like remuneration, time and travel demands, salary

certainty and so on, will stand a better chance of being favorably evaluated by most

potential employees than one relying on company attributes like corporate, social and

workplace reputation, provided that the latter three factors are not negative. Indeed, for

most corporations, it probably makes little sense to seek out a stellar reputation with the

ratings agencies in the hope of attracting talented employees.

This confirmation of orthodoxy will not sit well with HR consultancies and those

promoting the importance of Corporate Social Responsibility or MBA Oaths as critical

factors in an individual’s career choices. However, what is important about our findings is

that they are the result of a more rigorous examination of preferences and they are based

upon three distinct samples of individuals. In this, our work should help organizations

focus on what really matters to talented employees and avoid overinvestment in features of

reputation that should more naturally follow from how they provide functional value to

their employees. This recommendation is not inconsistent with other work in the social

responsibility and reputation literature.9 Invariably, opinion poll style surveys and

qualitative case studies significantly overstate the importance of social reputation as a signal

of an organization’s standing.

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Appendix: How this Research was Conducted

A full description of the research methodology is available on the Social Science Research Network – http//papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract id=1734605. In brief, it utilized three research methods.

The first was the design of a series of discrete choice experiments.10 Each respondent examined 16 pairs of experimentally designed job contracts. Each pair of contracts represented a mixture of the levels of contract features in Table 2 where the mixtures were based on a main factors orthogonal design. The features seen by the MBAs and White Collar workers included 8 common features with identical levels along with salary/compensation, which had different levels to reflect the different levels of compensation on offer. In the case of the White Collar workers this was represented as a percentage of the current/last salary as the variation in potential salaries was large. In the case of the MBAs actual dollar salaries were used, as the range of potential offers was known. Each group – MBAs and White Collar workers – had 6 contract features that were unique to that group. All of the features and levels were extensively pre-tested using controlled experiments as well as assessment by experts and potential participants.

The second aspect of the research was the use of standard surveys that query individuals about their job preferences. In this case, we utilized the standard set of questions used by the Graduate Management Admissions Council.11 This was done to ensure comparability with the information being received by the MBA programs and also because it is a standard that is accepted both by recruiters and placement services. Additional information about the individual’s current and past employment was also gathered. In the case of the MBAs, they were queried as to their top-5 dream employers along with what they thought were the attributes of these employers.

The last aspect of the research was the statistical analysis. Consistent with current approaches we utilized a Bayesian Hierarchical Modeling approach that allowed us to generate model estimates for each individual in the sample.12 Doing so provided us with information about each individual’s WTP as well as allowing us to compare each WTP estimate (and its variance) for each individual with that individual’s survey responses and personal characteristics (such as gender, income, education and so on).

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Table 1: Respondent Demographics

White-Collar Office Workers

Characteristic

MBA Sample (N=303) Employed

(N=617)

Under/Un-Employed (N=572)

Total (N=1,189)

Gender (Male) 71.0% 43.4% 15.8% 30.1%

Age 20-25 1.7% 3.4% 3.3% 3.4% 26-30 24.1% 28.2% 24.7% 26.5% 31-35 42.2% 24.9% 26.8% 25.8% 36-40 22.8% 28.2% 28.9% 28.5% 41 + 9.2% 15.4% 16.3% 15.8%

Highest Education Level High School Degree (or less) 14.0% 22.2% 18.0% Apprenticeship/Technical Education 17.8% 29.7% 23.4% Bachelors Degree 54.5% 40.5% 28.2% 34.6% Certificate/Diploma (or equivalent) 6.9% 11.7% 11.6% 11.6% Post Graduate Degree 35.6% 16.0% 8.6% 12.5%

Field of Study (if appropriate) Business/Commerce 41.7% 55.2% 52.5% 53.9% Engineering/Science 44.0% 22.5% 17.2% 19.9% Arts/Humanities/Social Sciences 14.0% 22.3% 30.3% 25.2%

Nature of Employment Full time 83.8% 0.0% 43.5% Part time (Regular) 16.2% 5.3% 10.9% Part time (Irregular) 20.5% 9.8% Unemployed (seeking employment) 74.3% 35.7%

Annual salary in current (or last) position Below $20,000 4.5% 17.3% 10.7% $20,000 - $39,999 8.6% 29.6% 18.7% $40,000 - $59,999 (< $60,000 for MBAs) 12.4% 29.2% 33.7% 31.4% $60,000 - $79,999 17.4% 26.6% 10.4% 18.7% $80,000 - $99,999 19.3% 16.5% 5.5% 11.1% $100,000 or above (for non-MBAs) 14.6% 3.5% 9.4% $100,000 - $119,999 (for MBAs) 16.6% $120,000 - $139,999 (for MBAs) 13.3% $140,000 - $179,999 (for MBAs) 12.4% $180,000 or above (for MBAs) 8.7%

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Table 2: Example of a Choice Task (MBA Respondents)

Contract Options in a Hypothetical Choice Set

Feature* Contract A Contract B

Contract Length No length specified 2 years Corporate Reputation Named by the

Reputation Institute as one of the most respected companies locally

Not listed by the Reputation Institute but known to receive negative media coverage from time to time

Location (city) Medium size city Major metropolitan area Location (MBA) Out of country where

MBA received In country where MBA received

Overseas Posting Yes No Pension 5% contribution by

employer 14% contribution by employer

Promotion Opportunities

Yes, but limited to middle management

None for the next 3 years

Salary $150,000 $110,000 Salary Split 100% salary 80% salary; 20% bonus Signing Bonus $5,000 $15,000 Social Reputation Not listed by the GRI

but generally recognized as a respected company for its social stance

Named by the GRI in the top 25% of most socially responsible companies globally

Stock Options No Yes Time Demands 50-60 hours, weekends 50-60 hours, 5 days Travel Demands Approximately 2 days

per week Minimal travel expected

Workplace Reputation Not named by Hewitt Associates in Best Employer survey but generally recognized as a good employer

Named by Hewitt Associates in their Best Employer survey as one of the best places to work locally

* Each feature was described in more detail at the beginning of the choice task.

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Table 3: Relative Importance of Job Contract Features (percent of total value)

White-Collar Office Workers Job Contract Feature

MBAs Employed Under/Unemployed Total

Salary/Compensation 23.2% 13.9% 8.7% 11.4% Time Demands 15.0 15.1 19.6 17.3 Bonus vs Salary Split 8.9 24.3 21.2 22.8 Promotion Opportunities 8.6 4.8 4.6 4.7 Travel Demands 7.8 8.6 9.5 9.0 City / Size 7.7 4.4 1.4 3.0 Corporate Reputation 7.5 3.4 4.1 3.6 Location (Country) 6.6 Location (Relocation) 4.9 10.5 7.6 Workplace Reputation 5.6 3.8 5.4 4.6 Social Reputation 3.2 5.0 2.8 3.9 Signing Bonus 2.0 Pension 1.8 3.4 1.8 2.6 Stock Option 1.3 Overseas Opportunities 0.7 Contract Length 0.2 2.9 0.8 1.9 Professional Development 2.9 1.7 2.3 Work Flexibility 1.2 3.0 2.1 Family Friendly Work Policies 0.2 2.6 1.4 Unionized Workforce 0.5 1.6 1.0 Community Involvement 1.1 0.8 1.0

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Figure 1: How the Level of Corporate, Social and Workplace Reputation Influence Job Contract Choice

Note: Significant effects are represented by the coefficients given in the graphs

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Figure 2: Survey Responses on Stated Company and Job Characteristics Preferences

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End Notes 1 This research was supported by a Discovery Grant from the Australia Research Council 2 E. Michaels, H. Handfield-Jones and B. Axelrod, “The War for Talent” (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2001). 3 See for example, R. D. Gatewood, M. A. Gowan and G. J. Lautenschlager, “Corporate Image, Recruitment Image and Initial Job Choice Decisions”, Academy of Management Journal, 36, no. 2 (1993): 414-427; D. S. Chapman, K. L. Uggerslev, S. A. Carroll, K. A. Piasentin and D. A. Jones, “Applicant Attraction to Organizations and Job Choice: A Meta-Analytic Review of the Correlates of Recruiting Outcomes”, Journal of Applied Psychology, 90, no. 5 (2005): 928-944. 4 Hill & Knowlton “Reputation & the War for Talent”, Corporate Reputation Watch, (2008), http://www2.hillandknowlton.com/crw/downloads.asp. Accessed 7 December, 2011. 5 See for example, C. B. Bhattacharya, S. Sen, and D. Korschun, “Win the War for Talent”, MIT Sloan Management Review, 49, no. 2 (2008): 37-44: M. E. Porter and M. R. Kramer, “Creating Shared Value”, Harvard Business Review, (January – February, 2010): 1-17; A. Kemper and R. Martin, “After the Fall: The Global Financial Crisis as a Test of Corporate Social Responsibility”, European Management Review, 7 (2010): 229-239. 6 Kelly Services, “Social Responsibility Key to Acquiring Top Talent”, http://www.easyir.com/easyir/kellyservices/KGWI_Global_Social_Responsibility_final10-26-09.pdf (28 October 2009; Accessed 30 December 2010). 7 S. Bonini, D. Court and A. Marchi, “Building Corporate Reputations”, The McKinsey Quarterly, June (2009), 75-83. 8 C Fombrun, “List of Lists: A Compilation of International Corporate Reputation Ratings”, Corporate Reputation Review, 10, no. 2 (2007): 144-153. 9 T. M. Devinney, P. Auger and G. M. Eckhardt, The Myth of the Ethical Consumer, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 10 J. J. Louviere, D. A. Hensher and J. D. Swait, Stated Choice Methods: Analysis and Applications, Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 11 Graduate Management Admissions Council, Global MBA Graduate Survey, McLean, VA: GMAC, 2009. 12 P. Rossi, G. Allenby and R. McCulloch, Bayesian Statistics and Marketing, Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2006