Lessons Learned from Fortune 100 Companies on Job Applicant Attraction

This research identifies which recruitment characteristics attract potential user interest on social media network LinkedIn, measured by the number of likes the posting received on LinkedIn. This research provides an insight on the recruitment message’s content, form, and function. We contribute to the existing research on social media with practical recommendations. This fills a gap in the recruitment literature, which has been criticized for being too theoretical and lacking practical relevance by focusing not only on the theory but also on the social media behavior of successful employers in practice. To answer our research question, we conducted content analysis using 2020 corporate LinkedIn postings of the Fortune Magazine 100 “Best companies to work for”. We developed a list of 15measures to identify the job- and organizational attractiveness, organized around three main categories: content, form, and function. We found the specific elements of form, function and success on LinkedIn that contributes to user interaction. In terms of content, challenging and interesting work, prestige of the job, company reputation and location contributed to user interaction, whereas the mention of supportive, competent and warm coworkers, did not contribute to user interaction and the description of the job position as prestigious contributed negatively. We found that the form elements of picture, color and audio/video, functional elements of questions contribute to more user interaction. Furthermore, while salary and opportunities for improvement are improvement job selection criteria highlighted in the literature, the practice of Fortune 100 companies show that for the user interaction in social hiring, they are not included. Lastly, the use of links negatively influenced user interaction on social media. Our study confirms the importance of content, form, and function in relation to job and organizational attractiveness on social media. We provide a practical insight into which elements of content, form and function to use for successful online recruitment efforts on LinkedIn.