When Employer Branding Alone Isn't Enough: The Mediating Power of Candidate Satisfaction in Talent Attraction

Résumé

Abstract

Purpose. In a context shaped by globalization, accelerated digital transformation, and an intensifying war for talent, employer branding has emerged as a strategic lever for organizations seeking to attract scarce and valuable competencies. While the direct effects of employer branding on organizational attractiveness are well documented, the intermediary and contextual mechanisms through which this influence unfolds remain insufficiently understood, particularly within specific sectoral and national settings such as the Moroccan call center industry. This article addresses this gap through a sequential mixed-methods design, combining an exploratory qualitative study with a confirmatory quantitative study.

Design/methodology/approach. The study was conducted at the Concentrix call center in Agadir, Morocco, a sector characterized by high workforce turnover and intense competition for talent, through a sequential mixed-methods design combining an exploratory qualitative study with a confirmatory quantitative study, the former informing the construction of the latter. Sample. The exploratory phase relied on thirteen semi-structured interviews conducted with recently hired employees, analyzed through computer-assisted thematic analysis using NVivo 11, combining within-case and cross-case coding. The confirmatory phase relied on a structured questionnaire administered, following an exhaustive sampling strategy, to employees and candidates of the same organization, analyzed through Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM), entirely implemented within the R statistical environment using the psych, REdaS and seminr packages.

Findings. The qualitative phase identified three structuring themes, employer branding (reputation, organizational culture, compensation, communication), candidate satisfaction (clarity of information, recruitment process experience, feedback interactivity, expectation matching), and talent attraction (value compatibility, development opportunities, value proposition, organizational engagement), together with a transversal contextual theme, labor market conditions, acting as a moderating factor. The quantitative phase statistically confirmed these qualitative insights: the direct effect of employer branding on talent attraction proved weak and non-significant (β = 0.018; t = 1.24; p = 0.216), whereas the indirect effect mediated by candidate satisfaction was robust and highly significant (employer branding, satisfaction: β = 0.052; t = 4.37; p < 0.001; satisfaction, attraction: β = 0.061; t = 5.12; p < 0.001), raising the explained variance from R² = 58% to R² = 72%. The integration of control variables and the labor market moderator raised the model's explanatory power to R² = 94%, with all interaction coefficients between labor market conditions and satisfaction dimensions proving significant (coefficients ranging from 0.187 to 0.447; p < 0.05).

Conclusion. Taken together, these results show that employer branding does not attract talent directly: its influence operates almost entirely through the satisfaction candidates experience during the recruitment process, a mediating mechanism whose strength is itself shaped by prevailing labor market conditions. For organizations, and for call centers in particular, this implies that investing in the coherence and quality of the candidate experience yields more than communication effort alone, and that retention and attraction strategies should be adjusted to the state of the labor market.

Originality/value. This research offers one of the few empirical investigations of employer branding grounded in the Moroccan call center sector, an industry that remains scarcely represented in the international literature on this topic. Methodologically, it illustrates a complete sequential mixed-methods protocol, from inductive thematic analysis to confirmatory PLS-SEM modeling entirely conducted in the open-source R environment, offering a transparent and reproducible alternative to proprietary structural modeling software. Theoretically, it provides robust empirical support for the full mediating role of candidate satisfaction and for the moderating role of labor market conditions in the employer branding–talent attraction relationship.

Keywords: employer branding; talent attraction; candidate satisfaction; labor market conditions; mixed methods; thematic analysis; PLS-SEM; R software; call centers; Morocco.