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Some firms excel at positively presenting their employer brand (talk), while others excel at effectively implementing human resource management (HRM) practices for the benefit of the employees (walk). Which approach is more effective? Focusing specifically on small and medium-sized hotels (SMHs), this study explores the relation of employer branding (EB) and HRM practices with organizational performance (OP).

Stratified sampling was used to identify 34 top management figures (owners, CEOs, and top HR managers) from SMHs across Greece. These individuals agreed to participate in in-depth, semi-structured, one-on-one interviews, focusing on their hotels’ HRM, EB, and organizational performance. The interviews were subjected to content analysis, further coupled with graphical exploration of the relations between the concepts under study.

The findings reveal a noteworthy pattern: high-performing SMHs tend to prioritize EB, particularly leveraging social media channels. This prioritization is further reinforced by the implementation of HRM practices, including extensive training and rewards. Clustering SMHs into four different levels based on their application of EB and HRM practices and the effect of these practices on OP, enables us to extend this study and gain valuable insights into the interplay of these factors.

This study highlights the need for practitioners to invest in HRM practices, especially in training and rewards, while giving due attention to EB, despite the potential resource limitations SMHs often face. Importantly, when basic levels of HRM are combined with high levels of EB, OP seems to be maximized.

Both HRM and EB deal with the employer – employee interaction, that’s why EB in most companies is the responsibility of the HRM department. Surprisingly, academic research has treated them as distinct fields, in isolation, ignoring their combined effects. This paper is the first to conceptualize EB as communication (“talk”) and HRM as practice (“walk”) and to thus propose that a complementarity relationship between these two dynamics may facilitate OP. Additionally, this study is the first to combine content analysis with a quantitative exploration to gain more holistic and valuable insights on the topic.

Previous literature has identified human resources as a key source of competitive advantage in organizations of all sizes. However, Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) face difficulty in comprehensively implementing all recommended Human Resource Management (HRM) functions. In this study, we shed light on the field of HRM in SMEs by focusing on the context of Greek Small and Medium-sized Hotels (SMHs), which represent a dominant private sector employer across the country.

Using a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) and 34 in-depth interviews with SMHs' owners/managers, we explore the HRM conditions leading to high levels of performance, while taking into consideration the influence of internal key determinants.

We uncover three alternative successful HRM strategies that maximize business performance, namely the Compensation-based performers, the HRM developers and the HRM investors. Each strategy fits discreet organizational characteristics related to company size, ownership type and organizational structure.

To the best of the authors' knowledge this is among the first empirical studies that examine different and equifinal performance-enhancing configurations of HRM practices in SMHs.