Unique… like everyone else: effects and mechanisms of personalization appeals in recruitment advertising

Abstract

Recruiters are faced with the challenge of replacing departing skillsets as older workers retire. To tackle this task of attracting new employees, recruiters often use advertising. Various employment platforms offer the option to personalize such employment ads by integrating individuals’ names and photographs in their ads. This research examines recruitment ad personalization effects on individuals’ responses under consideration of the mediating roles of perceived considerate treatment and reactance to the advertisement between ad personalization and organizational attractiveness, the latter being a means to increase job-pursuit intention and click intention. Across three between-subjects online experiments, we show that personalized job advertisements increase organizational attractiveness via a perception of being treated considerately by an organization. Perceived considerate treatment furthermore mitigates reactance effects on recipient responses and leads to increased click and job pursuit intentions. For some types of personalization, individuals’ sense of uniqueness reinforces the positive effect of personalization on perceived considerate treatment.