Employer Branding: COVID Impact on IT Companies

Strategic talent management remains challenging for IT companies, especially since the COVID pandemic. This challenge is due mainly to the limited supply of highly skilled prospects. Add high workforce mobility to the mix, resulting in considerable hiring, training, and development costs. Employer Branding is an effective tool to help IT employers overcome these challenges and attract employees to these employers. Employer Branding is a strategy that firms can utilize to manage their reputation as a “great place to work.” With the proliferation of social media, review sites, and electronic word of mouth, this reputation has increasingly been influenced by the evaluations employees share publicly and access on those platforms, especially employer review sites. IT firms must understand what values matter most to employees to manage their brands effectively. Based on a content analysis of 94,365 employee reviews, this research evaluates eight values that IT professionals consider when evaluating IT employers. This article expands on previous research and looks at employees’ reactions to those values before and after COVID. By comparing the results of pre-COVID and after COVID, we can see which values are most important to employees and provide recommendations for IT firms on how they can use employer brand value propositions to attract and retain IT talent post-COVID.