Abstract:

Before entering the job market, and throughout their courses, grad students develop a set of expectations regarding their future jobs and careers. By identifying and understanding students’ aspirations, HEIs employability and career offices can play an active role in matching students expectations with future employers’ propositions of job offers. The value proposition of an employer has been subject of inquiry in different academic frameworks. The Internal Marketing framework suggests that, to attract and retain talented employees, companies need to invest in Employer Branding Strategies and clearly communicate the benefits, the uniqueness, the value of their job offers.

This paper embraces this view and adopts the concept of Employee Value Proposition (EVP) as the set of attributes, characteristics, benefits, rewards, both financial and non-financial, most valued by employees. The literature suggests 5 EVP attributes that companies need to reflect on:
(1) pay (e.g. base salary, incentives, transparency),
(2) benefits (e.g. health, retirement, time of work),
(3) work content (e.g. autonomy, challenge, feedback),
(4) affiliation (e.g. mission and values, reputation, work environment), and
(5) career (e.g security, training, personal growth). Studies on how employees evaluate their employers’ EVP are abundant. However, research on the expectations of job seekers’, particularly grad students, regarding EVP attributes is still sparse.

Hence, aiming at furthering our understanding of grad students’ perceptions and expectations on their dream jobs and future careers, this paper sets two research goals. Firstly, it explores which attributes are encapsulated in students’ narratives of their ‘dream jobs’. Secondly, it compares students’ expectations on the attributes of a ‘dream job’ with EVP building blocks. Primary data was collected from graduate students, who will soon become job seekers in their early career stage.

A questionnaire, combining close-ended and open-ended questions, allowed us to retrieve more than 400 written descriptions of two key questions:
1) “What is your dream job?”;
2) “How do you visualise your career?”.

These responses were analyzed using text mining, word cloud, and content analysis in order to identify which EVP dimensions emerge from the students’ narratives.

Findings reveal that grad students are able to clearly identify the attributes related to dimensions ‘pay’, ‘affiliation’ and ‘career’, but do not recognize other attributes linked to EVP. Furthermore, many students simply answered that they do not know, or they have not think about it yet, which raises some concerns. Hence, the contributions of this study are twofold: on one hand, it can help HEIs career offices to better understand how to prepare students for job search according to EVP attributes. On the other hand, it can also help firms designing better job offers embedded in EVP rationale, given the perceptions of future career aspirants (students).

Keywords:

Internal marketing, employee value proposition, students’ expectations, career, job.