Sylvie St-Onge wins an award for a study on employer labels

Professor Sylvie St-Onge is one of the winners of an award for academic research in management, for a scientific paper co-authored with Professors Chloé Guillot-Soulez of the iaelyon School of Management and Sébastien Soulez, of Université Lumière Lyon 2.

The award was presented by Syntec Conseil, the professional organization of consulting firms in France, in partnership with the French Foundation for Management Education (FNEGE).

The paper, published in Recherche et Applications en Marketing, examines the effectiveness of employer certification labels, used by some organizations to describe their working conditions. The team of researchers wanted to determine whether such labels actually boost a potential employer’s attractiveness in the eyes of possible job candidates.

The study also looked at the benefits and drawbacks of using labels, depending on the type of business, i.e., publicly traded companies vs. co-operatives.

They based their research on an experimental study of 320 Canadian university-level management students, showing them recruitment ads with or without employer labels.

The researchers found that labels indicating good working conditions, such as the “Great Place to Work” label, produced better results among young graduates seeking employment.

This proved true for both publicly traded companies and co-operatives. In addition, co-operatives benefit from associating this kind of label with an indication of their governance mode.

They also found that labels indicating that the employer is “Ecological” are slightly less effective. Moreover, using multiple labels does not add to organizational attractiveness – on the contrary, it leads to information overload and confuses job candidates.