Importance of Employer Branding in “War For Talent”

Abstract

Numerous researchs in the previous period has shown that there is a significant impact of human resources
on the creation and maintenance of a competitive advantage, and that human resources have a statistically significant
impact on organizational performance. This points to the need to define a human resource management approach that
will ensure the appropriate quality of employees who are able to contribute to organizational success. A special focus
is on talents who provide knowledge, skills and capabilities with a measurable difference in the quality of human
resources between organizations. Talent management, as a special discipline in human resources management, needs
to create an organization's internal environment so that it can attract, develop and retain talents. This is especially
important in a situation where the supply of talented individuals in the labor market is significantly lower than the
demand that encourages the competition of companies in the labor market and leads to a "talent war" on a global scale.
The intensity of the "talent war" is rising sharply due to the fact that the other possibilities for gaining competitive
advantage through traditional resources are heavily exhausted and therefore companies are increasingly focused on
intangible sources for gaining competitive advantages such as knowledge, skills, intellectual capital and etc. An
important activity of talent management is the way of presenting the employer or creating a better image of the
organization in the public as a good employer. These activities, marked as the employer branding, should contribute to
better positioning of companies in the local and global labor market. The aim of the paper is to point out the
significance of the employer brand as a strategic tool that supports the talent management process and helps to attract
and retain talents in the organization. The purpose of the paper is to identify human resource management activities
that can contribute to the building of the employer brand. The paper presents the results of a survey conducted on a
sample of 180 Serbian companies. The results of the correlation analysis of the observed variables showed that the
strongest significant positive relationship was identified between the employer's brand and employee development as
an important human resources management activity. The practical contribution of the work is reflected in the
possibility of identifying human resource management activities that through talent management can most contribute
to the building of the employer's brand.