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The purpose of this paper, systematic literature review, is twofold: to identify the factors influencing graduate job choice and to propose a theoretical model that can be useful for future research.

Thematic analysis of the literature available till June 2020 has been reviewed using electronic databases such as ABI/INFORM Complete, EBSCO, Emerald Insight, ProQuest, SAGE Journals, Science Direct (Elsevier), Scopus, Springer Link, Taylor and Francis Online, Wiley Online Library.

Out of more than 5,000 studies, 14 studies were found addressing the issue of career choice among graduating students. The thematic analysis result explored five themes such as internal factors, external factors, interpersonal factors, institutional factors and socio-demographic factors that can be considered critical for graduates’ career choice decision. Details of the subthemes are also identified.

Implications for practitioners have been suggested from the internal factors, external factors, interpersonal factors, institutional factors and socio-demographic factors’ perspectives. The study result can be useful for conducting future research using quantitative data on graduate job choice.

This is the first attempt to present a comprehensive picture of past studies on graduate job choice and exploring the factors influencing graduate job choice.

Using data from 184 employed Hispanic‐American and Anglo‐American participants in the United States, the present study examined the relations between four cultural values (i.e., collectivism, power distance, familism, present time orientation) and job choice preferences. Results revealed that (1) collectivism was positively related to the importance of coworkers and working in a diverse organization, (2) familism was related to preferences for jobs with personal time off, and (3) power distance was related to the importance of organizational reputation and promotion opportunities. In addition, the findings revealed that, relative to Anglo‐Americans, Hispanic Americans felt that organizational reputation, flexible work hours, bonuses, and diversity were more important job choice factors. Implications are offered for conducting future research on job choice and developing recruitment practices in multicultural organizations in the United States.

Past research has largely portrayed job choice as a relatively rational and goal‐directed behavior where applicants make decisions contingent on organizational recruitment activities, or evaluations of job and organizational attributes. Research now informs us that job choice decisions may also be based on social comparisons and social influence. The purpose of this paper is to add to this body of knowledge by examining reasons why social influence is a key factor in job choice decisions of relatively young job seekers.

The study is based on in‐depth interview data from graduating seniors at an elite business school in India.

Respondents did not see themselves as acting based on social influence as much as they perceived others around them to be. Reasons they noted for others’ socially influenced job choice decisions were: peers and seniors are seen as more accessible and trustworthy than organizations; organizations do not share all and/or objective data, driving job seekers to other sources; job seekers are clueless and hence follow a “smart” herd; and job seekers make decisions for social status signaling. Respondents pointed to socially influenced job choices as being rational behaviors under certain conditions.

Generalizability of findings may be limited to young job seekers or to the Indian context, and the authors encourage replication. The authors also acknowledge the importance of individual difference variables in job choice decisions, a factor not considered in the present research.

Given that job seekers rally around others’ notion of an attractive job or an organization, the paper outlines several implications for managerial practice.

This study, in a yet unexamined cultural context, points to the simultaneous and combined importance of normative and informational social determinants of job choice, bias blind spots in one's own job choice perceptions and decisions, gender specific socialization influences on job choices, and the notion of job fit in terms of fitment with expectations of important reference groups.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the factors influencing the decision of managers to work in the nonprofit sector and how these choices are shaped by intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. Additionally, this research examines the impact of job choice motivation on social, community and professional outcomes and the unique characteristics of managers in the nonprofit sector.

This research employed data from the National Administrative Studies Project (NASP-III) survey, which measured the mid- and upper-level managers working in nonprofit organizations in Illinois and Georgia. The survey measured the manager’s perceptions of various organizational issues, including work motivation, mentoring and communication, career histories, hiring practices, and organizational cultures and structures. The data were then analyzed using a hierarchical regression model.

The findings of this research support the idea that intrinsic motivation is an important aspect of job choice motivation for individuals in the nonprofit workforce. In addition, the findings suggest other characteristics, including policies that enhance work life balance (WLB), advancement, and job security, are important to understand the job choice motivations of nonprofit managers. This research also found not all types of nonprofit agencies attract similarly motivated individuals, or lead to equivalent community outcomes.

The organizations represented in the NASP III sample included more membership and professional associations than the overall nonprofit sector. This over representation partially limits the generalizability of these findings but it also allows the research to more thoroughly understand this unique subset of organizations that serve predominantly the narrow interests of their members.

This research highlights the advantage nonprofit employers have over other organizations in terms of using intrinsic motivations to attract employees. However, the findings also suggest nonprofit organizations need to focus on human resource (HR) strategies including policies that enhance WLB, advancement, and job security to compete with other employers for talent. Finally, the research also suggests the need to tailor HR strategies to groups of nonprofit employees based upon important employee characteristics such as gender, job type, and prior career experience.

This study extends a well-developed body of knowledge on motivations and selection of career paths to individuals working in the nonprofit sector. It also suggests variations among employees and organizations matter in terms of the type of individuals attracted to particular career path in nonprofits. Additionally, this research suggests future research needs to include more nuanced examinations of the differences which exist among organizations in the nonprofit sector rather than simply focussing upon similarities across the most prevalent types of nonprofit organizations.

The purpose of this study is to explore the tradeoff between person-job (PJ) fit and person-organization (PO) fit by new job seekers across different recruitment stages and the influence on their job choice decisions.

A time-lapse research design was adopted with data from a survey over a two-year period of college students majoring in hospitality and tourism management at different recruitment stages (i.e. generating applications, maintaining applicant status and making a job choice).

The results suggest that PJ fit has a stronger influence on job choice decisions than PO fit, and both fit perceptions are consistent across recruitment stages. However, the difference between the two fit perceptions may be affected by direct interactions with recruiters at career fairs and interviews.

When recruiters start interacting with job seekers during the initial stage of the recruitment process, the recruiters are more likely to receive a favorable job choice decision from these potential applicants. Additionally, recruiters should create a positive perception of hiring companies and jobs through career fairs or other face-to-face communications to keep job seekers interested and maintain their applicant status throughout the recruitment stages.

This paper explores important factors that influence job seekers’ job choice decisions throughout the recruitment process with three main stages, which provides a more holistic overview of the transition of job seekers’ fit perceptions of the job and the organization. It also provides empirical support for current understanding of recruitment issues in the hospitality industry.

This research draws upon decision-making theory to study job choice decisions. Past studies measured job choice as a single-stage, compositional process addressing the weights and part-worth utilities of a selected number of job and organizational attributes. However, the presence of noncompensatory attributes and whether the utilities and weights attached to the attributes vary among applicants have not been addressed. The authors posit that a conjoint analysis is an accurate methodological technique to explain job choice and overcome these limitations.

Using a random sample of 571 participants, we conducted an adaptive choice-based conjoint analysis to estimate the weighted utilities of eight employer attributes and a cluster analysis to identify differences in preferences among employee profiles.

The results reveal that the use of the conjoint technique contributes to the literature in two ways. First, the results demonstrate the relevance of nonnegotiable attributes in the design of job offers. The results show that Salary, Flexibility and Ethics serve as cutoff points. Second, the results highlight the importance of considering the latent preferences of applicants in crafting effective job offers and adequately segmenting job applicants. More specifically, the following three groups are identified: Career-seeking applicants, Sustainability-oriented applicants and Pragmatic applicants.

The managerial implications of this study are relevant for HR and employer brand managers since a better understanding of the job-choice process and implementing a decompositional method to understand applicants' preferences could allow firms to provide more customized and relevant job offers to employees of interest.

This study concludes that to implement efficient employer-attraction branding strategies, employers should understand the attributes considered noncompensatory by their employee target audience, promote the most valued/important attributes to ensure that job offers are customized to fit employees' underlying preferences, and devise trade-off strategies among compensatory attributes.

Are women held back or holding back? Do women choose their jobs/careers or are they structurally or normatively constrained? The purpose of this paper is to shed fresh light on these questions and contribute to an on‐going debate that has essentially focused on the extent to which part‐time work is women's choice, the role of structural and organisational constraints and the role of men in excluding women.

The paper uses data from interviews with 80 working women – both full‐time and part‐time – performing diverse work roles in a range of organisations in the south east of England.

It was found that many women do not make strategic job choices, rather they often “fall into” jobs that happen to be available to them. Some would not have aspired to their present jobs without male encouragement; many report incidents of male exclusion; and virtually all either know or suspect that they are paid less than comparable men. Those working reduced hours enjoy that facility, yet they are aware that reduced hours and senior roles are seen as incompatible. In short, they recognise both the positive and negative aspects of their jobs, whether they work full or part‐time, whether they work in male‐dominated or female‐dominated occupations, and whatever their position in the organisational hierarchy. Accordingly, the paper argues that the concept of “satisficing”, i.e. a decision which is good enough but not optimal, is a more appropriate way to view women's working lives than are either choice or constraint theories.

There is an ongoing, and often polarised, debate between those who maintain that women choose whether to give preference to work or home/family and others who maintain that women, far from being self‐determining actors, are constrained structurally and normatively. Rather than supporting these choice or constraint theories, this paper argues that “satisficing” is a more appropriate and nuanced concept to explain women's working lives.

Drawing from experiential theory and decision-making theory, this article aims to posit that workplace aesthetics acts as a driver for job choice when included with an employment offer. Whilst organisational literature has recognised that office experiential cues in general, and aesthetics in particular, affect employee performance and well-being, employer attractiveness scales have not yet incorporated office aesthetics as a component of job-offer choice.

A choice-based conjoint (CBC) experiment was conducted to estimate the weighted utilities of three aesthetic and three non-aesthetic employer attributes. Subsequently, the attributes' importance in the job choice decision was estimated.

The results indicate that aesthetic attributes in the workplace can be equally important in the decision-making process as non-aesthetic attributes and that aesthetic attributes deliver as much utility as non-aesthetic attributes in driving job choice.

These conclusions are relevant for Human Resource (HR) managers engaged in crafting job offers, who should consider that employees may improve their assessment of a job offer as a result of superior organisational aesthetics demonstrated during the recruitment process as well as in contexts where employees would be expected to combine remote and office-based work.

The present study represents a novel approach to understanding job applicants' preferences for aesthetic elements in the workplace. The results suggest that the workplace experience is relativistic and that considering applicants' latent preferences is crucial when designing efficient job offers.

Using a discrete choice experiment (DCE), this study aims to better understand the job preference of postgraduate students studying at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology-Institute of Distance Learning, Ghana and also rank the attributes of a job they deem important.

The research adopted a positivist epistemological design contextualised within a deductive approach and case study strategy. Primary survey data was collected from a stratified random sample of 128 postgraduate students with multi-sectorial career prospects. Sample students were subjected to a DCE in which their stated preferences were collected using closed-ended questionnaires with 28 pairs of hypothetical job profiles. Respondents’ preferences from the DCE data were then modelled using the conditional logit.

The research reveals that: salary in the range GHC 2,800.00 to GHC 3,400.00 ($1 = GHS 5.3); supportive management; very challenging jobs; and jobs located in the city were the top attributes that were significant and had the most impact in increasing the utility of selecting a particular job. Interestingly, jobs with no extra hours workload were not significant hence, had a negative impact upon student preferences.

This novel research is the first to use a DCE to better elicit preference and trade-offs of postgraduate students in a developing country towards varying job characteristics that have an impact on their future employment decisions. Knowledge advancements made provide invaluable insight to employers and policymakers on the key criteria that should be implemented to retain the best candidate.

This chapter applies three of the most prominent theories in vocational and career psychology to further illuminate the turnover process. Prevailing theories about attrition have rarely integrated explanatory constructs from vocational research, though career (and job) choices clearly have implications for employee affect and loyalty to a chosen job in a career field. Despite remarkable inroads by new perspectives for explaining turnover, career, and vocational formulations can nonetheless enrich these – and conventional – formulations about why incumbents stay or leave their jobs. To illustrate, vocational theories can help clarify why certain shocks (critical events precipitating thoughts of leaving) drive attrition and what embeds incumbents. In particular, this chapter reviews Super's life-span career theory, Holland's career model, and social cognitive career theory and describes how they can fill in theoretical gaps in the understanding of organizational withdrawal.