How Much Does the Recruitment Channel Really Matter: Recruiters’ and Applicants’ Behaviors in the South Asian Context

Bilal Latif,Muhammad Fayyaz Sheikh,Qamar Ali

doi:10.29145/jmr/81/080101

Abstract

In this paper, we discern recruiters’ and applicants’ tendencies towards recruitment channels. By drawing on the contextual perspective of human resource management (HRM), we argue that the national institutional environment of a country greatly influences recruiters’ choices of recruitment channels and applicants’ level of attractiveness towards jobs. Using an experimental study (n = 200 graduate students) and in-depth interviews of 10 human resource managers, we find that a) although recruitment channels positively affect applicants’ perceptions of organizational attractiveness, they have no significant impact on applicants’ intentions to apply for the job and b) even though online recruitment channels are widely believed to have a greater impact on organizational attractiveness, recruiters in the south Asian context continue to prefer the paper-based recruitment channels. The study provides interesting insights for recruitment literature, by explicating that socio-cultural and economic context enormously shapes recruiters’ and applicants’ preferences of recruitment channels.

Highlights

Recruitment literature suggests that the content, style, and channel of job advertisements significantly impact the applicants’ perceived organizational attractiveness and intentions to apply for the advertised job
It revealed that the participants who viewed Facebook and paper-based advertisements demonstrated significantly lower perceived organizational attractiveness as compared to the participants who viewed LinkedIn and website advertisements
The interpretive analysis of the transcripts of these interviews revealed a number of interesting insights into the recruitment process and the mediums used by the employers in the garment industry of Pakistan

Summary

Introduction

Recruitment literature suggests that the content, style, and channel of job advertisements significantly impact the applicants’ perceived organizational attractiveness and intentions to apply for the advertised job. One stream of this literature (Belinda, Westerman, & Bergman, 2018; Puncheva-Michelotti, Hudson, & Jin, 2020; Younis & Hammad, 2020), drawing mainly from the field of information and communication sciences, emphasizes the communication side of the advertised message and its relationship with organizational attractiveness. The findings of our empirical study illustrated that recruitment channels affect job applicants’ perception of organizational attractiveness but do not affect their intentions to apply for the job. Our analysis of in-depth interviews of recruiters indicated that organizations in Pakistan mostly prefer traditional recruitment channels (such as newspapers)

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Conclusion