Abstract
Companies increasingly use artificial intelligence (AI) and algorithmic decision-making (ADM) for their recruitment and selection process for cost and efficiency reasons. However, there are concerns about the applicant’s affective response to AI systems in recruitment, and knowledge about the affective responses to the selection process is still limited, especially when AI supports different selection process stages (i.e., preselection, telephone interview, and video interview). Drawing on the affective response model, we propose that affective responses (i.e., opportunity to perform, emotional creepiness) mediate the relationships between an increasing AI-based selection process and organizational attractiveness. In particular, by using a scenario-based between-subject design with German employees (N = 160), we investigate whether and how AI-support during a complete recruitment process diminishes the opportunity to perform and increases emotional creepiness during the process. Moreover, we examine the influence of opportunity to perform and emotional creepiness on organizational attractiveness. We found that AI-support at later stages of the selection process (i.e., telephone and video interview) decreased the opportunity to perform and increased emotional creepiness. In turn, the opportunity to perform and emotional creepiness mediated the association of AI-support in telephone/video interviews on organizational attractiveness. However, we did not find negative affective responses to AI-support earlier stage of the selection process (i.e., during preselection). As we offer evidence for possible adverse reactions to the usage of AI in selection processes, this study provides important practical and theoretical implications.
Highlights
The human element remains crucial in recruitment, firms increasingly digitize parts of the recruitment process and implement artificial intelligence (AI) and algorithmic decision-making (ADM) in their selection procedures
Emotion and attitude reside between the person and the stimulus, the only difference being that emotions are rather temporally constrained, while attitudes last for a longer period (Clore and Schnall 2005). Given that those affective responses to selection processes are important for organizational attractiveness and job acceptance intentions (Hausknecht et al 2004; Ryan and Ployhart 2000), we propose that perceived opportunity to perform, emotional creepiness, and organizational attractiveness are three major affective responses in the context of AI usage during recruitment and selection procedures
AIsupport in later stages of the recruitment process increases emotional creepiness, while AI-support in preselection is similar to a pure human evaluation concerning emotional creepiness, which only partially supports our hypothesis 2
Summary
The human element remains crucial in recruitment, firms increasingly digitize parts of the recruitment process and implement artificial intelligence (AI) and algorithmic decision-making (ADM) in their selection procedures. Unilever saved 100,000 h of human recruitment time using algorithmic video analysis (Devlin 2020). Algorithmic decision tools offer additional analytical possibilities, such as extracting and analyzing candidates’ personality traits from the application and predicting their potential job performance (Suen et al 2019). Despite the firms’ enthusiasm for ADM, there remain concerns regarding applicant acceptance of algorithmic selection procedures (e.g., Acikgoz et al 2020; Langer et al 2019). Human decisions are perceived as fairer, more trustworthy, more interactionally, and evoke more positive emotions than algorithmic decisions in hiring situations (Acikgoz et al 2020; Lee 2018)
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