Assessing company employment image: An example in the fast food industry

Historically, there has been little guidance from the recruitment literatur e on how organizations can assess the image that potential applicants hold of their company as a place to work. We demonstrate the application of a te chnique for identifying employment image dimensions that are most critical in distinguishing among companies in the same industry, and show how this i nformation can be used to assess companies relative to their competitors on these dimensions. We used a forced-choice inductive methodology to identif y relevant dimensions of company employment image in the fast food industry , and randomly assigned high school students (n = 336) and retirees (n = 10 2) to describe 1 of 8 well-known fast food companies on the dimensions. In addition, respondents indicated their general image of the targeted company as a place to work. We were able to identify dimensions that both discrimi nated between companies and predicted general image, and graphically benchm arked one company against other companies on image dimensions.