How applicants respond to the recruitment process: unravelling temporal patterns of fairness perceptions

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ABSTRACT Applicants shape their fairness perceptions during the recruitment process, but previous research has paid little attention to how applicants’ perceptions of fairness change over time and has mainly focused on the assessment phase. Drawing on the two-paradigm view of organizational justice and the dynamic model of organizational justice, we provide in-depth insights into if and how applicants’ event and entity fairness perceptions change throughout the entire recruitment process. We propose a dual-factor model of entity and event fairness to delineate key processes or patterns of dynamic systems: inertia, cross-lagged effects, and time trends. Dynamic structural equation modelling of daily measures of N = 73 actual applicants, who completed digital diaries during their recruitment process for 24 days indicated three temporal patterns of response over time: moderate-to-strong inertia, small decreasing time trends, and small positive cross-lagged associations with next-day fairness perceptions. These findings substantiate the propositions of the dynamic model of organizational justice, underpin the two-paradigm view of organizational justice, and stress the importance of preventing negative trends in fairness perceptions even before the assessment phase.