What is the Right Mix? Toward a Compensatory Theory of Employer Attractiveness

Despite its long history, employer attractiveness research so far has almost exclusively studied large corporate firms and focused on the question which employer benefits influence firms’ employer attractiveness. However, we know only little about to what extent these findings generalize to more resource-constrained firms, such as small companies and start-ups. To address this void in the literature, this study integrates the theory of instrumental-symbolic employer benefits with a neo-configurational perspective to propose and test a compensatory theory of employer attractiveness that explains how start-ups achieve high employer attractiveness. Using set-theoretic methods, we analyze 219 s…