Differential Impact of Content in Online Communication on Heterogeneous Candidates: A Field Study in Technical Recruitment

Recruitment is a critical activity for companies, and the research community has also shown significant interest in examining technology recruitment. Companies often communicate how they value their employees along with job requirements to potential candidates in a bid to attract them. However, there is an overall lack of understanding of how candidates react to such information and how their motivation toward the job changes with such online communication. Although there is substantial work that examines the decision-making process of managers who do technical hiring, to the best of our knowledge, there is a paucity of work that investigates the decision-making process of technical candidates. The broad research question studied is how including certain content in online communication about a technical job opportunity may (de)motivate heterogeneous candidates differently in applying for the job. We theorize the underlying process of how including certain content in online job communication may influence candidates’ propensity to apply and their minimum acceptable salary increase if they were to join the company. Additionally, we capture mediating variables that influence the effect of different online content on candidates’ propensity to apply and on candidates’ minimum acceptable salary increase. By testing actual job application behavior in a field study, we confirmed the content that can attract high performers while discouraging low performers from applying.

History: Yong Tan, Senior Editor; Yan Huang, Associate Editor.

Supplemental Material: The online appendices are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.2022.1120.