Motivated reasoning during recruitment.

Abstract

This research shows how job postings can lead job candidates to see themselves as particularly deserving of hiring and high salary. We propose that these entitlement beliefs entail both personal motivations to see oneself as deserving and the ability to justify those motivated judgments. Accordingly, we predict that people feel more deserving when qualifications for a job are vague and thus amenable to motivated reasoning, whereby people use information selectively to reach a desired conclusion. We tested this hypothesis with a two-phase experiment (N = 892) using materials drawn from real online job postings. In the first phase of the experiment, participants believed themselves to be more deserving of hiring and deserving of higher pay after reading postings composed of vaguer types of qualifications. In the second phase, yoked observers believed that participants were less entitled overall, but did not selectively discount endorsement of vaguer qualifications, suggesting they were unaware of this effect. A follow-up pre-registered experiment (N = 905) using postings with mixed qualification types replicated the effect of including more vague qualifications on participants' entitlement beliefs. Entitlement beliefs are widely seen as problematic for recruitment and retention, and these results suggest that reducing the inclusion of vague qualifications in job postings would dampen the emergence of these beliefs in applicants, albeit at the cost of decreasing application rates and lowering applicants' confidence.Keywords: Entitlement; deservingness; motivated reasoning; recruitment practice; selection 3 Motivated Reasoning during RecruitmentTo build a strong workforce, companies must recruit and retain qualified employees.Researchers note that these tasks are difficult given increasing concerns about entitlement beliefs; workers see themselves as deserving unrealistically high pay or other resources (Harvey & Dasborough, 2015;Jordan, Ramsay, & Westerlaken, 2016;Twenge, 2006). Such concerns have also garnered attention in the popular press. As a post in The New York Times "You're the Boss" blog noted, "The notion that some employees seem to think they are owed something just for showing up is a difficult pill to swallow…" (Mueller, 2012). These beliefs would be consistent with the legal understanding of entitlement, whereby outcomes are prescribed by formal or normative rights and are not contingent on one's actions. However, they are not consistent with typical hiring and compensation practices, usually featuring outcomes contingent on contributions and achievements. Employees' entitlement beliefs thus pose major problems for managers (Fisk, 2010) and warrant investigation of the sources of these beliefs.Although discussions of entitlement beliefs often center on millennials (Bisceglia, 2014;Twenge, 2006), some managers report equal or greater problems with entitlement beliefs in older employees (Mueller, 2012). Indeed, data suggest that millennials' sense of entitlement may not differ substantially ...

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