What Drives the Attractiveness of Public and Private Employers? Comparative Evidence From an Online Employer Review Platform

• Published date: 01 February 2024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/02750740231206805
• Author: Rick Vogel,Melissa Satzger
• Date: 01 February 2024

What Drives the Attractiveness of Public

and Private Employers? Comparative

Evidence From an Online Employer

Review Platform

Rick Vogel

1

and Melissa Satzger

1

Abstract

Employees’attraction to public or private employers is an issue of enduring practical concern and scholarly debate, with

inconclusive evidence of both the levels and the drivers of employer attractiveness. This study buildson online reviews of

more than 5,000 U.S.-based organizations by more than 200,000 current and former employees, using their recommendations

as a behavioral and consequential measure of employer attractiveness. Results of a relative weight analysis show that public

employees place less importance on altruistic and intrinsicattributes compared to their counterparts in the private sector

when they recommend or do not recommend their employers, but more importance on social attributes; while no sector

differences emerge for extrinsic and prestige attributes. These patterns remain stable when we focus onan industry with little

occupational variation across the sectors. As some of these results contradict previous scholarship, they suggestthat

employer attractiveness at the post-entry stages of the human resource cycle, when preferences may change as a consequence

of employee expectations and experience, is a puzzle that deserves more scholarly and practical attention.

Keywords

employer review platform, job attributes, organizational attraction, relative importance analysis, reward preferences,

word-of-mouth

Introduction

In the midst of the “war for talents,”attracting highly quali-

f‌ied employees is crucial for many organizations in fast-aging

societies with shrinking workforces (Leisink & Steijn, 2008).

Consequently, public sector employers increasingly f‌ind

themselves in f‌ierce competition with employers from the

private sector. How well they perform in this competition,

however, is far from clear, although a considerable volume

of research has been done to explore the attractiveness of

public employers compared to private ones. While a majority

of studies f‌ind the public sector to be less attractive for job

seekers than the private sector, feeding concerns about the

competitiveness of public employers on labor markets (e.g.,

Bright & Graham, 2015; Fowler & Birdsall, 2020; Lewis &

Frank, 2002; Ng & McGinnis Johnson, 2020; Pedersen,

2013; Pepermans & Peiffer, 2022; Santinha et al., 2021), a

still notable body of research f‌inds the opposite (e.g.,

Cordes & Vogel, 2023; Lee & Choi, 2016; Ng & Gossett,

2013; Weske et al., 2020).

Scholarship is not only inconclusive regarding whether

public employers perform better or worse than private

employers in terms of attractiveness, but also about the

reasons why employees f‌ind employment in either of the

sectors more or less attractive, even though considerable

research has been conducted on the drivers of employer

attractiveness (Fowler & Birdsall, 2020; Lee & Choi, 2016;

Lewis & Frank, 2002; Ng et al., 2016; Vandenabeele &

Jager, 2020; Wright & Christensen, 2010). Many studies

focus on a small range of or even single attributes of employ-

ment in the two sectors, thus not accounting for the fact that

employees choose their employer in multi-incentive settings

in which they trade off many criteria simultaneously

(Asseburg et al., 2020; Perry & Vandenabeele, 2015). This

narrow perspective often goes along with a focus on how

individuals with particular characteristics, such as public

service motivation (PSM; Perry & Wise, 1990), respond to

the studied employment attributes. However, few conclu-

sions can be drawn about how employment attributes are

more generally associated with employer attractiveness,

since it is unclear how widespread these characteristics are

in the general working population. Finally, the more directly

1

University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany

Corresponding Author:

Rick Vogel, Faculty of Business, Economics and Social Sciences, Department

of Socioeconomics, Charir of Public Management, University of Hamburg,

Von-Melle-Park 9,Hamburg 20146, Germany.

Email: Rick.Vogel@uni-hamburg.de

Article

American Review of Public Administration

2024, Vol. 54(2) 180–197

© The Author(s) 2023

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/02750740231206805

journals.sagepub.com/home/arp

previous research has addressed this association, the less

variety is ref‌lected in the sampling. Almost all of these

studies have built on samples of students, graduates, and

young professionals (e.g., Fowler & Birdsall, 2020; Ko &

Jun, 2015; Ng & Gossett, 2013), while far less is known

about how public and private employers resonate among

more experienced employees, and the reasons why (Ritz

et al., 2023).

This study addresses these limitations and contrasts with

previous research by examining how experienced employees

in the public and private sector have actually and upon their

own initiative evaluated their employers along a broad range

of employment attributes. We explore how the attractiveness

of public and private employers differ, what employment

attributes drive employer attractiveness, and how the impor-

tance of these drivers differs between the public and the

private sector. We refer to employment attributes as charac-

teristics of the working environment that an organization

offers upon employment (Asseburg et al., 2020; Ployhart &

Kim, 2014). We prefer the broader notion of employment

attributes, rather than job attributes, because such attributes

are not necessarily associated only with a particular job,

but more generally with the membership of an organization.

With this research focus, our study is based on data from an

online employer review platform, building on reviews of

5,087 U.S.-based organizations by 202,943 current or

former employees who rated their employers along several

criteria, and recommended (or not) these organizations to

other platform users. As job seekers increasingly consult

such platforms to gather f‌irst-hand information about poten-

tial employers (Melián-González & Bulchand-Gidumal,

2016; Schaarschmidt et al., 2021), scholarship in human

resource management (HRM) has acknowledged online

word-of-mouth (WOM) as an important factor in organiza-

tional attraction and job choice decisions (Evertz et al.,

2019). To the best of our knowledge, we are among the

f‌irst to use online employer reviews to inform public admin-

istration (PA) scholarship (Luoma-aho et al., 2021; Satzger &

Vogel, 2023).

Our study provides new evidence of the competitive

advantages and disadvantages of public employers relative

to employers from the private sector. Public administration

scholarship urgently needs more insights into both the

levels and drivers of employer attractiveness in the public

sector compared to that of the private sector. It is diff‌icult

to inform the development or adjustment of employer brand-

ing strategies without more comprehensive information

about the extent to which people f‌ind employment with a

public or private employer attractive, and which attributes

contribute to that attractiveness. We contribute to this

stream of literature in three ways. First, we draw conclusions

from real evaluations of real organizations operating in the

U.S. This should foster the external validity of our study as

compared to the attitudinal measures frequently used in aca-

demic surveys and scenario experiments. Second, whereas

previous research is preoccupied with initial or early-career

employment decisions, our focus is on evaluations by more

experienced employees. Employer attractiveness matters

along all stages of the HR cycle, as employers are challenged

both to recruit and to retain talent. Third, we examine a

broader range of employment attributes than many previous

studies, and determine their relative importance within the

multiple criteria that may matter for employer attractiveness

(Asseburg et al., 2020; Perry & Vandenabeele, 2015;

Ripoll et al., 2023). This more comprehensive perspective

will help to put into perspective the f‌indings from studies

with a narrower focus on a few or even single attributes

and corresponding characteristics of job seekers.

Literature Review and Hypotheses

Literature Review

Several study streams in previous research have touched

upon the attractiveness of public vis-à-vis private employers

(Cordes & Vogel, 2023; Fowler & Birdsall, 2020; Pepermans

& Peiffer, 2022; Ritz et al., 2023). We focus our brief review

on studies whose designs have a comparative element, so that

participants evaluate or choose between employment in the

public or private sector. More research is available on how

employment attributes drive employer attractiveness within

either of the sectors. However, results from single-sector

studies may also hold true for employment in other sectors,

because people may have similar attitudes toward employers

regardless of the sector aff‌iliation, and employers from differ-

ent sectors may offer employment with similar attributes.

Multi-sector studies are thus more concise when exploring

how employer attractiveness varies with sector aff‌iliation

and further employment attributes.

Our review is structured along the framework in Figure 1.

Available scholarship differs in the extent to which it directly

evaluates the two dimensions of interest (i.e., employment

attributes and employer attractiveness). Only a few studies

examine both respondents’preferences regarding particular

employment attributes and their attraction to public or

private employers, respectively. However, the body of rele-

vant literature goes beyond these studies, because other

research allows inferences from closely related observations

in either or both dimensions. Below, we summarize each of

the quadrants in the framework and exemplarily quote repre-

sentative studies. Single studies may be assigned to more

than one quadrant, as they may build on both direct assess-

ments and related observations.

Research in the f‌irst quadrant asks respondents about their

attitudes to employment attributes, and uses measures or indi-

cators of how much they feel attracted to public or private

employers, respectively. For instance, Ng and Gossett

(2013) demonstrate that Canadian students who prefer

public service careers simultaneously place signif‌icantly

more emphasis on work-life balance than students who

Vogel and Satzger181