Extending the Boundaries of Corporate Branding: An Exploratory Study of the Influence of Brand Familiarity in Recruitment Practices Through Social Media by B2B Firms

The rapid growth of social media has prompted B2B firms to incorporate social media platforms into their marketing communication. Notably, for B2B firms, social media has become a useful tool for corporate branding. However, how B2B firms can leverage benefits from social media marketing is less obvious, especially in new markets. In this study, we investigate the challenges and opportunities faced by B2B firms in exploiting the social media for their recruitment practices in an international context. In this regard, we focus on the effects of brand familiarity and users’ persuasiveness on their adoption of social media channels for job search. We employ a cross-country dataset from a multinational B2B firm to investigate how it can successfully integrate social media into its recruitment practices. Our empirical results suggest that users’ brand familiarity encourages them to adopt social media platforms for job search; however, the effect of the persuasiveness of recruitment messages on users’ adoption of social media platforms for their job search behavior is negative. Nevertheless, a higher level of brand familiarity mitigates the problem of the low persuasiveness of the recruitment messages as we find a positive effect of the interaction between brand familiarity and user persuasiveness on their adoption of social media channel for job search. Thus, without proper user engagement on social media platforms to build brand familiarity, the effectiveness of recruitment messages may not encourage users to adopt the social media channel for job search. Therefore, our study recommends B2B firms to build better brand familiarity on social media platforms to engage with the users first before they attempt to use these platforms directly for their recruitment strategy. In addition, we find a synergistic effect between social and nonsocial media channels thereby recommending B2B firms to employ both channels in their recruitment practices.