Recruitment Research and Applicant Attraction: What Have We Learned?

Abstract

Developing labor shortages are increasing the importance of recruitment to organizations. However, previous recruitment research has provided few operational guidelines for persuading high quality candidates to apply for, and to accept, job offers. This is because most recruitment research has either ignored major independent variables (e.g., vacancy characteristics), and/or focused on dependent variables other than applicant attraction or job choice (e.g., turnover). Suggestions are made for increasing the relevance of future recruitment research to applicant attraction.