Providing more or less detailed information in job advertisements—Does it matter?

Abstract

Job advertising is a common and useful recruitment marketing method that is available to a wide range of candidates and offers a practical way to widen the applicant pool. Frequently, retail advertisements only briefly introduce job requirements, but others provide more detailed information. Existing message studies, however, are inconclusive about the effectiveness of message specificity. A scenario-based experiment that included 164 participants revealed that the type of decision maker (maximizer or satisficer) moderates the specificity effects in recruitment messages. After receiving a detailed job message, more satisficers stop their search process, but only maximizers perceive the company as more attractive and increase intentions toward the advertised job. A follow-up qualitative study involving 30 participants provided further insights. K E Y W O R D S decision-making style, job advertisement, maximizer, message specificity, recruitment marketing, satisficer S U PP O RTI N G I N FO R M ATI O N Additional supporting information may be found online in the Supporting Information section.How to cite this article: Liu Y-L. Providing more or less detailed information in job advertisements-Does it matter? Int J Select Assess. 2020;28:186-199. https ://doi.

Designing job ads to stimulate the decision to apply: a discrete choice experiment with business students

“…Since employer branding is about the relative positioning of competing organizations (Bangerter et al, 2012), many potential applicants appreciate job ads in particular for communicating basic information only (Liu, 2020), because this facilitates comparative assessment and thus the decision to apply. In fact, potential applicants prefer employment offers that entail alignable attributes ('the same yet better') over those with unique attributes (Wille et al, 2020).…”

“…We cannot evaluate whether our attributes as signals were perceived as either instrumental or symbolic attributes, because we were only interested in the perceived value of attributes and not in perceived benefits, i. e. the individual, qualitative interpretations of attributes (Ronda et al, 2018). Capturing perceived benefits would be a helpful addition to better understand preference structures and necessitates mixed method studies that interview participants (for an example see Liu, 2020).…”

“…None of these studies included job ads. We identified two recruitment source studies on the intention to apply determined by job ads showing that the specificity and length of text has a positive influence (Acarlar & Bilgiç, 2013;Liu, 2020). Of all these studies on the influence of employer knowledge on the intention to apply, only Liu (2020) further specifies the attributes behind organizational image, although it is widely suggested that potential applicants evaluate and compare the attractiveness of recruitment sources such as job ads based on job and organizational attributes (Boswell et al, 2012;Chapman et al, 2005).…”

A linear regression approach to predicting salaries with visualizations of job vacancies: a case study of Jobstreet Malaysia

“…Jobstreet's job information consists of multiple attributes such as the salary, position, job type and Int J Artif Intell ISSN: 2252-8938  description, and location. However, far less information is provided in relation to the salary offered, the job scope, and the requirements needed to apply for the job, which graduate students need to find and explore [2]. The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) has received many requests from job seekers to identify salaries [3].…”

Occupational profiling driven by online job advertisements: Taking the data analysis and processing engineering technicians as an example

“…At the same time, online recruitment has become an important channel for recruiters to release information and for job seekers to find jobs [5]. The content of the recruitment posts usually contains specific descriptions of the job information, specialty requirements, educational requirements, experience requirements, skill requirements, etc [6]. By extracting the requirement information from the recruitment text and aggregating it into effective vocational information, it can be used as an effective supplement to the traditional occupational profiling.…”