When Sustainability Speaks, Talent Listens: A Framework for Integrating a Sustainability-Oriented Value Proposition into Employer Branding

Seeing the unsustainable and misleading business practices of big-name brands and companies, customers, suppliers, investors, and governmental and non-governmental organizations are raising concerns about the significant and far-reaching negative social-ecological impacts of such practices. Given these pressures and scrutiny from key stakeholders, businesses have recognized the need to integrate sustainability goals into their business objectives and have been actively trying to perform well on the sustainability front, creating visible positive socio-ecological impacts. Moreover, a lot has changed in the demands and expectations that employees have from organizations, with a large section of them going beyond just traditional job-related benefits (e.g., salaries, bonuses, and insurance) and striving to get opportunities to contribute to social-ecological welfare. Employer branding has become integral for organizations to communicate and form connections with both existing and potential employees. This shift calls for integrating sustainability aspects into the employer value proposition. While the literature on sustainable HRM and employer branding is extensive, covering topics related to incorporating sustainability into HR practices and engaging employees, there is surprisingly insufficient effort to take stock of the existing literature and build a framework on how to integrate sustainability-oriented employee value propositions into employer branding. Against this backdrop, drawing on the existing literature, we argue that for organizations to implement their sustainability initiatives successfully, a sustainability-focused approach to employer branding is essential. To this end, we start by conceptualizing sustainability-focused employer branding, addressing its challenges and associated considerations. Building on this, we propose practical strategies for attracting and acquiring talent. The core elements of our framework include enhancing employer attractiveness, employing value-based hiring practices, harmonizing organizational identities, and evaluating and refining talent acquisition strategies to better align with sustainability values. The proposed framework provides insights into how sustainability-focused employer branding can be used as a tool to attract and acquire talent and how such branding has an impact on organizations’ sustainability initiatives. This chapter paves the way for future research to test the impact of sustainability-focused employer branding on talent acquisition and retention. We hope that future studies will further explore the relationship between sustainable development goals (SDGs) and employer branding, examining their broader implications across various organizational contexts.