The title of this master’s thesis is The Company X-factor?! – a Recruitment Analysis with a Rhetoric and Employer Branding Perspective. The thesis statement is that the recruitment process can be optimized. To investigate this statement, two groups have been studied – the companies and their prospective applicants, respectively. The chosen groups adhere to the following criteria: The companies must be private corporations and they must have either their head office or a branch office in Northern Jutland, Denmark. The prospective applicants must be near to finishing a tertiary education and must be students in Northern Jutland. Specifically, this thesis wants to investigate how these two groups relate to each other in the recruitment process, and how companies can optimize their recruitment process with help from the two theoretical perspectives. The reason why this issue remains relevant, despite the present financial crisis and recession, is that the group in focus (the highly educated) has not been as affected by the increasing unemployment rate as other groups in society. Within the group of highly educated, we still find very sought-after people some of whom will even be employed before they have finished their education. The present thesis will look at its research area from various perspectives. The empirical findings laying the founda-tion for the investigation are partly the results form questionnaires given to the two target groups, and partly an anal-ysis of a selection of 5 job advertisements. The two entities will be analytically compared and contrasted to each other, thereby forming the overall analytical framework. To further critically illuminate the different communication strategies in the recruitment process, two main theoreti-cal directions have been chosen: rhetoric and employer branding. The former elucidates some of the effects that may be rhetorically used to influence the other in a given situation, and the latter exemplifies what a company can best do to brand itself as an attractive workplace. The five job advertisements will be presented as five different types, more specifically as ‘classroom stereotypes’, i.e. the good student, the lazy student, etc. All advertisements will be worked with on three levels: first an investigation will be conducted of whether the offers in the job advertisements confer with the results from the questionnaires. This will be followed by a rhetorical analysis of how the companies are representing themselves from an outside perspective. This, then, will end in an examination of whether the companies are making use of employer branding, and if so what this tells us about the company. If the company is not using employer branding, suggestions of how it could be beneficial to them will be offered. Finally, in light of all three perspectives, each job advertisement will be evaluated in terms of how successful it has been in attracting prospective employees. The concluding chapter will sum up on the main thoughts and ideas presented throughout the present thesis and will highlight what strategies a company may emphasize in order to strengthen their recruitment process. It is however important to note that the chosen strategies have been exclusively selected from the views held in this thesis. It is therefore not necessarily a given that the companies themselves feel that their existing recruitment processes would benefit from nor need changes. Nevertheless, the investigations of the present thesis are substantiated alternative suggestions to the existing processes and are well-founded in modern theoretical frameworks. It is therefore hoped that the findings of this paper will prove a useful contribution to an already significant area of research within rhetoric and employer branding.