Employer branding concept for small- and medium-sized family firms

The area of this paper is employer branding of small-and medium-sized family firms. Its function is to attract the necessary quantity and quality of labour force to build competitive advantage in the market, differentiate from peers and thus facilitate company's prosperity. Labour shortage and aging society strike Central and Eastern Europe, therefore, employers face a disadvantageous bargaining position. Family firms, that are mainly small companies, are in a unique situation. Although employer branding is a useful and hot topic nowadays in some regions of the world, it is yet greatly underresearched empirically for some kinds of associations. To close this gap, this paper aims to present an employer branding concept. We extracted the output from a two-folded literature review on the existing knowledge about the public image of small family firms and the psychological needs and employee expectations about such workplaces and employers. We narrow down the area by handling a specific pattern of employees and conducting the whole research in Hungary. The solution we are proposing to fill the gap is an employer branding concept created by customization of the Business Model Canvas.