Abstract
Successful employer branding through social media recruitment campaigns becomes an ever more important channel for public sector employers in their competition with private sector companies for talented, capable and motivated employees. Current research on public sector employer branding identified emotions conveyed by employer brands as prerequisites for employer attractiveness and ultimately employer choices. Using audio and image recognition algorithms as well as human coders we identify the emotional cues (i.e., signals) transmitted to potential applicants contained in video recruitment campaigns of the German Armed Forces (“Bundeswehr”). Our results indicate the presence of positive emotional cues in the analysed video campaigns but also point towards their relatively low salience and conflicting simultaneous emotional cues present in such campaigns.