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

Recruitment is a critical activity for companies, and 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 capture mediating variables, such as candidate prior performance and candidate experience level, 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 find that content related to employee work efforts or personal interests can attract high performers while discouraging low performers from applying in different contexts.