Search results

Economic stressors such as job insecurity, job loss, unemployment, and underemployment cause severe difficulties for the workers affected, their families, organizations, and societies overall. Consequently, most past research has taken a thoroughly negative perspective on economic stress, addressing its diverse negative consequences and the ways that people try to cope with them. And even when following the advice provided by the scientific literature, people affected by economic stress will usually end up being off worse than they were before the onset of the stressor.

The current chapter pays credit to this perspective yet also tries to counterbalance it with an alternative one. While acknowledging the vast amount of literature outlining the negative consequences of economic stress on peoples’ well-being and careers, some literature also points at opportunities for a more positive perspective. More specifically, we argue that affected people can use a wide repertoire of behaviors for handling their current situation. Of particular promise in this regard is the concept of career adaptability, generally defined as the ability to change to fit into new career-related circumstances. Indeed, studies show that under certain conditions, career adaptability can facilitate people's search for not just any job but for a qualitatively better job, thus breaking through the spiral of losses usually associated with economic stress.

For the purpose of this argument, we link career adaptability to the concept of proactive coping, analyzing how and under which conditions career adaptability may present a contextualized form of proactive coping. We then address known personal and situational antecedents of career adaptability and show how career adaptability may be fostered and trained among different types of job seekers. We end this chapter with a discussion of open questions as well as directions for future research.

Searching for a job is an important process that influences short- and long-term career outcomes as well as well-being and psychological health. As such, job search research has grown tremendously over the last two decades. In this chapter, the authors provide an overview of prior research, discuss important trends in current research, and suggest areas for future research. The authors conceptualize the job search as an unfolding process (i.e., a process through which job seekers navigate through stages to achieve their goal of finding and accepting a job) in which job seekers engage in self-regulation behaviors. The authors contrast research that has taken a between-person, static approach with research that has taken a within-person, dynamic approach and highlight the importance of combining between- and within-person designs in order to have a more holistic understanding of the job search process. Finally, authors provide some recommendations for future research. Much remains to be learned about what influences job search self-regulation, and how job self-regulation influences job search and employment outcomes depending on individual, contextual, and environmental factors.

Introduction – The most basic rule of job search is job search behaviour. Job search behaviour is defined as the effort of the individual, time spent on various activities in order to find a job. In the current competitive labour market – the modern employment environment, where many employees who may have a temporary employment status, where the use of outsourcing is common practice, or where there are those who are under-employed, there is great importance in adopting a robust job search behaviour for job seekers. However, employees may have other factors that affect their job search behaviour. In Trusty, Allen, and Fabian (2019), various motivational categories were put forward. These seven different categories range from wanting to avoid undesirable situations in the workplace to finding better job search methods.

Purpose – This article seeks to explain the data related to this research; it will focus on combining positive psychological capital with seven different sources of motivation, as categorised in Trusty et al. (2019).

Methodology – The method that will be used for this article will consist of a semi-structured interviews, which were used as a vehicle to gather qualitative research and for data collection. The interview questions were prepared using the seven different categories of motivation as detailed by Trusty et al. (2019) and related literature to determine the job search behaviour of the employees.

Findings – The findings will also include input from managers of human resources department employees, where job search behaviour was found to be high, indications suggest problems caused within the working environment, includes poor working relationships with colleagues and supervisors. Also the inability to optimise the skills of individuals and limited career progression opportunities are examples that effect job search behaviour and attitudes to work.

The aim of this chapter is to explore employee behaviors and expectations of the role of social media when searching for jobs, to offer recruiters and companies valuable insights to design and manage appropriate web-based employer branding and recruitment strategies.

The research strategy is based on semi-structured in-depth interviews involving 34 central informants: talented Gen Yers and social media recruitment experts and mangers. The project focuses on the Italian context, an exemplary country with the highest social media penetration rate.

The results demonstrate the “bounded” popularity of social media as a recruitment tool among Gen Yers who implement up to five active and passive behaviors, albeit not all widespread, according to varying patterns and using different social media for different purposes: receiving, seeking, sharing, leading, and experiencing. Gen Yers, with aims that vary in line with various staffing phases, collect and share rumors and voices from both internal and controlled organizational sources but also, and above all, from external and organizational sources that companies do not control directly.

Social media seem to offer appealing and valuable opportunities to attract and engage talented young individuals, sustaining the quality, quantity, and fairness of employment relationships. Conversely, they also involve some organizational risks and costs. The chapter offers some managerial cautions and advocates a radical change in the prevalent HRM mindset for the improved management of transparency that social media solutions entail.

Results contribute in understanding how social media can better sustain employer branding and recruitment activities, especially considering the needs and expectations of talented young employees and professionals in the Italian context. Italy is an emblematic context, where the social media potential appears to be extremely interesting, considering its high rate of social media penetration.

In managerial accounting courses, students lacking business experience find the balanced scorecard (BSC) an inherently difficult topic to understand. Students may lack an understanding of business strategy, the BSC's perspectives, and the measures that a BSC uses to report performance. This chapter aims to assist instructors who teach the BSC by developing an analogy to a resume, which is a familiar concept to students. The analogy draws upon similarities between the BSC and a well-constructed resume: a cohesive strategy, multiple perspectives or areas, and multiple types of measures for each area. In using this approach, the instructor guides students through the process of viewing a resume as a vehicle for conveying a job-search strategy, similar to the way a BSC communicates an organization's strategy. Thus, students can apply their knowledge of the familiar (their own resumes) to the unfamiliar (the BSC). The chapter provides implementation guidance and results of student surveys. Our students responded positively to the exercise, saying that they learned the basics of the BSC, and even found the exercise enjoyable.

Purpose – The introductory chapter to this special issue highlights contemporary scholarship on networks, work, and inequality.Methodology – We review the last decade of research on this topic, identifying four key areas investigation: (1) networks and hiring, (2) networks and the labor process, (3) networks and outcomes at work, and (4) networks and institutional dynamics.Findings – Social networks play an important role in understanding the mechanisms by which and the conditions under which economic inequality is reproduced across gender, race, and social class distinctions. Throughout the review, we point to numerous opportunities for future research to enhance our understanding of these social processes.

Homophily, or the tendency for individuals to be attracted to those who resemble them, is significantly influential in the formation of startup founding and top management teams. But its role in subsequent stages of startup growth remains largely unclear. We consider the impact of homophily on matching of early workers to startups. We propose that, in the case of underrepresented minority groups, the tendency toward homophily plays an important role in this matching process, albeit in an asymmetric way. In particular, homophily exerts a stronger influence on the supply than the demand side: job candidates are more inclined to favor startups with demographically similar founders than startup founders are inclined to favor demographically similar job-seekers. Focusing on an important group of historically disadvantaged workers – women – we examine these arguments using unique data on the online recruiting of high-tech startups concentrated in the Silicon Valley. We find evidence suggesting that female candidates' propensity to apply to a job at a given startup increases with the proportion of female founders. However, startups with a higher proportion of female founders are not more likely than other startups to favor female candidates in personnel selection.

This chapter describes how higher education professionals and college students can use social networking sites and technology to manage their careers. Individuals can expect to change careers several times in a lifetime making the importance and role of social networks past and present central to the career management process. The way individuals communicate and interact through the use of social networking sites for the purpose of career development is discussed. The role of social networking sites in exploring career options, learning, making connections, searching for jobs, developing professionally, making decisions, and maintaining a professional image online is examined. A model is presented on using social networking sites to gather information and feedback during the career management process. Scenarios and examples are provided from higher educational professionals, hiring managers, college students, job seekers, and career changers. The chapter envisions the future of career management specific to higher education and addresses how higher education career advisors can respond to social networking sites and technology.

Over the last few decades, precarious work rose as an important feature of socioeconomic insecurity in contemporary Europe. The following study asks: How do labor market institutions and labor market conditions shape work precarity in Europe? This research captures the elusive concept of precarious work by measuring the degree to which a job (1) is insecure and uncertain, (2) offers poor prospects of career mobility, and (3) puts workers in an economically insecure position with low pay. Building on two theoretical paradigms, the Varieties of Capitalism and the Power Resource Theory, this study derives and tests hypotheses about how macro-level factors shape the variation in the distribution of precarious work in 32 European countries. Combining individual-level data from the 2010 European Working Conditions Survey with country-level data from multiple sources, my findings suggest that work precarity decreases in countries with high percentages of employees in all enterprises receiving continual training, high percentages of all enterprises providing on-the-job training for employees, and high levels of spending on active labor market policies.

Organizations have become increasingly interested in developing their human resources. One tool that has been explored in this quest is mentoring. This has led to a surge in mentoring research and an increase in the number of formal mentoring programs implemented in organizations. This review provides a survey of the empirical work on mentoring that is organized around the major questions that have been investigated. Then a conceptual model, focused on formal mentoring relationships, is developed to help understand the mentoring process. The model draws upon research from a diverse body of literature, including interpersonal relationships, career success, training and development, and informal mentoring. Finally, a discussion of critical next steps for research in the mentoring domain is presented.