Analysis of employee perception of employer brand: a comparative study across business cycles using structural topic modelling

Employer branding is an important measure to attract prospective employees and to motivate, engage, and retain their current employees. Employer branding is instrumental for the employer to position the organisation in the minds of current and potential employees by using a combination of economic, psychological, and functional benefits. In the current research the authors implement a set of natural language processing techniques (structural topic modelling) on the employee reviews posted on Glassdoor.com (an online platform where the employees can post reviews about their current and previous employers). The study has thematically structured the 35,075 reviews from 8 Information Technology companies, spanning 5 years from 2015 to 2019. The study compares the employer branding parameters and has identified the prominent dimensions across the expansionary (2015–2017) and contractionary (2017–2019) phases of business cycles. A significant difference in topical proportions were found across the business cycles, suggesting different priorities for different dimensions of the employer brand during expansionary and contractionary phases. The findings would serve as guidance for HR managers to understand the trends in the employee perceptions in the context of changing macro-environment situations and accordingly recalibrate their existing strategies for talent attraction and retention