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To introduce a model which examines the relationship between recruiters’ perceptions of image and the stigma of image norms.

This paper examines the influence of image norms on recruiters’ perceptions of applicants during interviews and explores the manner in which recruiters may stigmatize applicants. A model is presented which explores how image norms may be used to stigmatize applicants and affect recruiters’ decisions.

Image norms are found to have an influence on recruiters’ evaluations of applicants during the interview process.

Empirical tests of the model are suggested to illustrate how image norm violations lead to stigmatization during the recruitment process.

Applicants who are denied entry into organizations on the basis of their appearance or image, experience a subtle, yet unacceptable form of employment discrimination. Organizations need to ensure that they are not excluding potential employees who do not meet the image norm expectations of recruiters. Organizations need to make sure that the image norms used to evaluate applicants are not a proxy for discrimination based on protected characteristics.

This paper looks at image, a broader construct than physical attractiveness, to ensure equal opportunities for everyone. This is the first paper to consider the discriminatory effects of image in organizations.

The purpose of this paper is to determine the effects from perceptions of age disadvantageness when job candidates are interviewing with recruiters from different age groups. More specifically, the authors examine the issues of intergenerational recruiting through the lens of social identity theory (SIT) and relational demography. Using these theoretical underpinnings, problems that result from dissatisfaction with between group inequities in the recruiting process are explored.

Using these theoretical underpinnings, problems that result from dissatisfaction with between group inequities in the recruiting process are explored. Results from a survey of 176 undergraduate students actively pursuing sales positions provide evidence that candidate perceptions are influenced by age of the interviewer.

The results support that sales job candidates do indeed feel disadvantaged when interviewed by older recruiters. Compared to interviewers from a more similar age in-group interviewer, the respondents felt a greater difficulty in establishing commonality and credibility and they felt the need to establish dependability, demonstrate professionalism, energy, and enthusiasm with an older out-group interviewer. Interestingly, sales job candidates did not feel lower levels of job confidence relative to the age-group of the interviewer.

The study reflects the perceptions of sales job applicants sampled from only two universities in the same region of the USA. Generalizations outside of this job applicant population (i.e. major and geography) cannot be made based on this limited group of respondents. Additionally, outcomes were not explored in this paper, so there is no way to know with certainty that these feelings of disadvantageness translate to concrete differences in results, such as lower job acceptance.

From a recruiting/hiring managers’ perspective, they should be mindful that younger sales job candidates may feel uncomfortable or disadvantaged relative to age/generational differences. This could potentially even impact a recruit's desire to consider a company and accept a job offer, based on perceived organizational cultural differences. Educators need to prepare college students for the interview process. They should make students aware that they may feel the need to compensate for feelings that stem from intergeneration differences.

From a theory perspective, the study applies the SIT to a human resource and recruiting context to better understand possible recruiting barriers that may be particularly relevant in today's changing recruitment environment. This represents one of only a few empirical research efforts that has attempted to explain intergenerational recruiting issues relative to SIT. In addition to the use of SIT and relational demography, this paper introduces a unique context.

The purpose of this paper is to determine whether an outsourced recruitment service can provide a satisfactory organisational solution from the perspective of its line-managers.

The study is based on a single, large organisation involving dissemination of an on-line survey targeting line-managers with a recent record of hiring new employees. Using quantitative analysis including correlation, multiple regression and binary logistic regression, assessment is made regarding manager perception, including experience as customers, overall rating of the recruiter and a willingness to recommend the service.

Aspects of standard service, assessed in terms of operations and recruiter provision, are perceived as being at appropriately high levels, while the arguably more demanding external aspects of the recruitment process are perceived to be less successful. Line-manager satisfaction as customers and satisfaction with the recruiter are explained by various experiences of both service and recruiter, while willingness to recommend is explained in terms of customer satisfaction, satisfaction with the recruiter and recognition that the service provides added value. Personal line-manager experiences, perceived realisation of organisational values or achieving preferred line-manager recruitment objectives play no significant part in these explanations.

The research considered an individual organisation, with participating managers being solely from within. Further research could see the assessment being extended to other organisations perhaps at different points of maturity in their relationships with an external recruitment partner, as well as revisiting the participating organisation at a later point in time to assess potential changes in the relationships assessed.

To enhance line-manager satisfaction with service and with the recruiter, aspects of process and recruiter contribution both play a role, while these satisfaction indicators, in tandem with an appreciation of added value will prompt a line-manager to ultimately recommend such a service.

This centres on the assessment of an outsourced recruitment service from the particular perspective of its hiring line-managers, through evaluation of service satisfaction and willingness to recommend.

This paper has three purposes. First, it aims to explore important factors in the Chinese employment market. Second, it aims to find whether recruiters and applicants understand each other's expectations. Third, it aims to find whether applicants with different Hukou (locals vs non‐locals) have different expectations on position/organization characteristics and whether recruiters from organizations of different ownerships (foreign vs state‐owned) have different expectations on applicant qualifications.

A list of 15 applicant qualifications items and 15 position/organization characteristics items that are relevant in the Chinese context were generated by interviewing ten applicants and recruiters. Then 141 college graduates and 44 recruiters were surveyed in four job fairs in Beijing, and asked them to rank the importance of position/organization characteristics and applicant qualifications.

The study found that recruiters overestimated applicants' expectations on extrinsic rewards (e.g. salary) but underestimated their needs on intrinsic rewards (e.g. job security). Applicants overestimated recruiters' expectations on exogenous qualifications (e.g. local Hukou) but underestimated their expectations on endogenous qualifications (e.g. analysis skills). Local applicants have higher expectations on job locations and voice opportunities while non‐local applicants have higher expectations on local Hukou quota. Recruiters from foreign organizations have higher expectations on endogenous qualifications than recruiters from state‐owned organizations.

The applicant samples were college graduates in Beijing, and the findings may not be generalized to the whole job applicant population in China.

This paper represents an early attempt to investigate both recruiters' and job applicants' expectations at the pre‐employment stage in the contemporary Chinese context, and it provides practical suggestions to recruiters, students, and policy makers.

Recruiters in today’s organizations, through social networks, have the opportunity to see a candidate’s overall figure, and from this, they gain a first impression of their personalities which in turn affects their decisions. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the biasing role of candidates’ attractiveness – in facial and bodily terms – on perceived main personality features (i.e. core evaluations (CEs)) in selection decisions.

An experimental study involving professional recruiters (n=150) was conducted. Participants were asked to rate bodily attractiveness (using the objectification construct), CEs, facial attractiveness and hiring scores of six candidates for an administrative position; then, a moderated mediation model was tested.

This study suggests that recruiters’ perception of candidates’ CEs mediates the relationship between objectification (i.e. body attractiveness) and the assigned hiring score, while facial attractiveness amplifies or reduces the effect of objectification on CEs.

The value added of this contribution lies in studying the biasing mechanism of candidates’ overall attractiveness (facial and bodily) and its effects on the perceived core personality features.

The purpose of this study is to understand how applicant gender may interact with recruiter and organizational characteristics to affect organization attraction. Interpreting characteristics of individuals (e.g., recruiters) and organizations requires some degree of interpersonal sensitivity. Evidence shows that women are generally more skilled in this area than men, but women’s skills are not stronger when evaluating characteristics that are male relevant (e.g., dominance, status).

This study used an experimental between-subjects design in one sample of undergraduate students and one sample of working adults to explore the interaction of applicant gender with two known predictors of organization attraction: recruiter competence and hiring firm reputation.

As hypothesized, there was a significant interaction between recruiter competence and applicant gender on organization attraction in both samples. Contrary to the hypothesis, there was a significant interaction between hiring firm reputation and applicant gender in the sample of working adults, but not the sample of undergraduate students.

Results suggest that firms wishing to increase the number of women in their workforces should be particularly mindful of how they select and train recruiters as well as how positively their reputation is perceived by potential job applicants.

These results suggest that there may be gender differences in how applicants perceive and react to a variety of factors during the recruitment process that previous research has not considered.

Researchers have identified various recruiter and organization characteristics that individually influence staffing effectiveness. In extending contemporary research, the purpose of this paper is to address a straightforward question unexamined in previous research, namely, does recruiter political skill interact with organization reputation to influence applicant attraction in the recruitment process? Specifically, the authors hypothesized that for recruiters high in political skill, as organization reputation increases, applicant attraction to the organization increases. Alternatively, for recruiters low in political skill, as organization reputation increases, there is no change in applicant attraction to the organization.

Three studies were conducted to create the experimental manipulation materials, pilot test them and then conduct tests of the hypotheses. Study 1 created and tested the content validity of the recruiter political skill script. Study 2 reported on the effectiveness of the recruiter political skill experimental manipulation, whereby a male actor was hired to play the part of a recruiter high in political skill and one low in political skill. Finally, Study 3 was the primary hypothesis testing investigation.

Results from a 2×2 between-subjects experimental study (N=576) supported the hypotheses. Specifically, high recruiter political skill and favorable organization reputation each demonstrated significant main effects on applicant attraction to the organization. Additionally, the authors hypothesized, and confirmed, a significant organization reputation × recruiter political skill interaction. Specifically, findings demonstrated that increases in organization reputation resulted in increased applicant attraction to the organization for those exposed to a recruiter high in political skill. However, the effect was not for a recruiter low in political skill.

Despite the single source nature of data collections, the authors took steps to minimize potential biasing factors (e.g. time separation, including affectivity). Future research will benefit from gathering multiple sources of data. In addition, no experimental research to date exists, examining political skill in a laboratory context. This finding has important implications for the growing research base on political skill in organizations.

First impressions are lasting impressions, and it is very costly to organizations when recruiters lose good candidates due to the failure to make a memorable and favorable impression. This paper supports the use of political skill in the recruitment process and highlights its capability to influence and attract job applicants to organizations successfully.

Despite its scientific and practical appeal, the causal effects of political skill on important work outcomes in an experimental setting have not been formally investigated. As the first experimental investigation of political skill, the authors can see more clearly and precisely what political skill behaviors of recruiters tend to influence applicant attraction to organizations in the recruitment process.

Recruiters’ decision to use recruitment methods (RMs) depends on several expected outcomes such as number applications, quality of applicants, speed of filling up vacancy, post joining job performance, absenteeism, commitment and satisfaction of the applicants. RMs may vary from each other in terms of its capability to communicate different type of information. The current research aims at exploring recruiter's intention to use RMs like job advertisement (JA), online recruitment (OLR) and social media in reference to several recruitment outcomes (ROs). Further, the role of information credibility and sufficiency (ICS) on recruiter's intention to use has been studied.

Data were collected from 242 recruiters from the manufacturing and service sector of India. The survey instrument consists of RMs, recruitment outcome and credibility and satisfaction that are identified following the theory of planned behavior (TPB). Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was used for a simultaneous assessment of overall and specific elements of measurement validity and reliability. Structural equation modeling (SEM) is used to test the hypothesized model.

The result shows that RMs significantly relates with ROs. In detail, social media recruitment (SMR) significantly relates with pre ROs and post ROs; OLR significantly relates with pre ROs and post ROs and JA significantly relates post ROs. Only JA insignificantly relates with pre ROs. The result also supports the hypothesis that ICS acts as a mediator between the influences of RMs on ROs.

The result of the study has important theoretical and managerial implications. The theoretical implication is explained from the perspective of signaling theory (ST) and elaboration likelihood model (ELM) theory.

The study is unique as multiple RMs have been studied with reference to both pre and post ROs using the data collected from the recruiters.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether soft skill requirements found in employer job postings (advertisements) within different roles of business are similar to the soft skills practically needed in the workplace and the perception of faculties at schools of business in Bangladesh.

A two-phased study was administered. Phase 1 involved reviewing the latest relevant literature and hundreds of job advertisements; and in phase 2, questionnaires were administered to elicit responses from executives and faculty members from different universities in Bangladesh. Judgment sampling and the snowball technique were used to develop the sample of 84 respondents with a response rate of 56 percent. In total, 15 soft skills were used to develop the instrument. Descriptive statistics and a Kruskal–Wallis test were performed to analyze the collected data, where factors that retained α at or below 0.05, a family-wise Bonferroni adjustment (Mann–Whitney U test) was applied.

All the mentioned soft skills are found to be desirable by the recruiters and faculties also agreed with them. However, there exist disparities on the perceived importance of four soft skills among faculties and recruiters, and a gap was found between the business curriculum and industry expectations from fresh-out business graduates.

This study could be a basis for future studies and would help business education institutions guide their students to master the skills, and to develop and prepare them for real life battle in the job market. Moreover, the study indicates the gap between executives’ expectations from the graduates and the institutional teaching provided by higher education institutions (for business majors), which would help practitioners reform their business curriculum to better ensure employability for their business graduates. Moreover, the study opens an avenue for further research in this field for implementing training programs for attaining the most desired soft skills among higher education institutions.

In this chapter, we aim to make the following contributions to the perceived overqualification literature. First, we provide an opportunity-based fairness conceptualization of perceived overqualification, and differentiate it from other justice constructs. Second, we present a multilevel model of perceived overqualification, which enumerates the antecedents and consequences, and explicates the mediators and moderators of the effect of perceived overqualification. Third, we emphasize the importance of considering methodological issues in future research on overqualification. Finally, we offer specific suggestions in studying applicant overqualification and recruiter perceptions.