Employer Attractiveness Levels of Management Undergraduates: A Case Study from Sabaragamuwa University of Sri Lanka

Abstract

Attracting and retaining best employees in an organization is a challenging task any organization faces in the current business world. In order to attract better employees and to retaining them, the organization as the employer should brand their image as a good employer. Potential employees who are willing to join an organization may have different attractiveness criteria, which a potential employee may see as benefits in working for the specific organization. The purpose of this study is to identify the level of employer attractiveness/ organizational attractiveness of management undergraduates of Sabaragamuwa University of Sri Lanka (SUSL) who will be the potential employees in a recent future. Employer attractiveness has been categorized into five types namely: social value; development value; application value; economic value; and interest value. This study attempts to identify the perceptual differences regarding the gender and the future job ambition of undergraduates in that category regarding their employer attractiveness. In order to conduct the study, a sample of 115 final year management undergraduates of SUSL was selected out of a population of 312 undergraduates using stratified sampling method. Descriptive statistics was used to identify the level of employer attractiveness. In addition, Independent Sample T Test and One-Way ANOVA test were applied to check whether there is a mean difference of employer attractiveness according to the gender and future job ambition. Analysis results indicate that the highest employer attractiveness level of undergraduates is for social value and the lowest is for economic value. There was not a significant mean different of employer attractiveness with respect to gender but there was a significant mean difference of social values and interest values with respect to future job ambitions of the management undergraduates of SUSL. Furthermore, the study concludes that management undergraduates who have the ambition to become entrepreneurs have the highest attraction levels for both social and interest value. The findings of this study can be applied by employers to know the attractiveness criteria of potential employees and to attract and retain them by identifying their attractiveness types.