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

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 builds on 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 intrinsic attributes 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 on an industry with little occupational variation across the sectors. As some of these results contradict previous scholarship, they suggest that 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.