Do Inclusive Workplace Policies Foster Employer Attractiveness? Comparative Evidence From an Online Employer Review Platform

Abstract

Public sector employers increasingly promote inclusive workplaces, but the impact of such policies on employees’ perceptions of employer attractiveness has rarely been studied. A deeper understanding of how inclusive workplaces relate to employer attractiveness, and how this relationship differs between employment sectors, may inform recruitment policies and retention management. This study tackles this issue and provides a large-scale analysis of an online employer review platform, covering more than 16,000 Germany-based organizations as rated and recommended (or not) by more than 715,000 current and former employees. More specifically, it builds on person–organization fit theory and analyzes how employee referrals are associated with ratings in three dimensions of inclusive workplaces (i.e., inclusion of women, elderly, and disabled). The results show that inclusive workplaces are positively and significantly related to employer attractiveness, both on aggregate and across the three dimensions. The overall relationship is stronger in the case of public employers when compared with private employers, while there are no sector differences in the relationship when comparing public and nonprofit employers. The findings suggest that inclusive workplaces are advantageous in terms of employer attractiveness, not just for the beneficiaries of such policies, but even more so in the public sector.