Employer Branding - Kommunikationsforum

sector which are politicians, citizens, FOA (the labour union of social health care assistants) and the
media.
Applying the theoretical framework, the analysing part of the thesis focuses on which
characteristics the brand foundation should contain with a focus on a gap analysis between the three
stars culture, image and vision, where culture is the view current social health care assistants hold
upon their job, image is represented by social health care assistant students expectations to their
future job and vision consists of the employer branding strategy of Region Midtjylland. One of the
findings in this gap analysis is that current and potential employees hold a similar view of the job.
Some of the essential job characteristics are meaningfulness, care, pride, responsibility and flexible
work hours. Hence, there seems to be no major conflicts in communicating the true identity of the
job as a social health care assistant. The analysis did, however, find conflicts in regards to how
integrated the overall employer brand strategy of the region should be with the branding of the job.
There were several reasons for this as neither current nor potential employees view the region as the
employer. Rather, they view the hospital or department as the employer. Furthermore, the potential
employees value the work related field of subject higher than which region they should work for
and on these grounds the thesis suggests a less integrated approach between the overall employer
branding strategy and the branding of the job is recommendable. Based on the analysis of the case,
this thesis thereby argues that the concept of job branding is more relevant than employer branding.
This is also supported by the fact that the region holds various jobs with different identities and
therefore the values of the job are essential in creating a positive image for the job as social health
care assistant.
The investigation results in an adaption of the framework and by doing so the thesis represents new
and interesting empirical research for job branding in a context of the public sector.