The Impact of Gay-Friendly Recruitment Statements on a Firm’s Attractiveness as an Employer

Abstract

Increasingly more firms are targeting sexual minorities in recruitment ads to attain a diverse work climate. However, the challenge remains of recruiting job seekers without alienating qualified others. Drawing from the instrumental-symbolic framework and early recruitment literature, the current study investigates how employee recruitment statements regarding employment-at-will moderate the effect that diversity-supportive recruitment statements have on job seekers’ job pursuit intentions and attraction towards a firm. Using a between- subjects experimental design with American business students from a southern U.S. university, a model is tested that demonstrates an interaction effect between perceived instrumental job attributes and perceived symbolic attributes on the organizational attractiveness of a firm. Implications from the results are discussed, including how the manipulation of recruitment statements may act as a filter for sorting heterosexist job seekers from the labor pool of firms that value diversity.