Effects of Screener Self-Monitoring on the Relationships Among Applicant Positive Self-Presentation, Objective Credentials, and Employability Ratings

How does the interview change the importance of résumé information in acceptance decisions? An experimental study in the hotel industry

“…There is agreement in the research literature that during the employment interview, to increase the chance of being accepted by recruiters, applicants are motivated to use verbal behaviors as a means of IM by which they convince the recruiter that they are more qualified for the job vacancy than other their competitors (Chen et al 2010;Ellis et al 2002;Hazer and Jacobson 2003;Higgins and Judge 2004;Tsai et al 2005Tsai et al , 2010Van Iddekinge et al 2007). Verbal IM tactics can be divided into assertive IM tactics and defensive IM tactics.…”

“…This suggests that applicants' IM tactics with recruiters in an interview should influence the effect of résumé credentials on the chance of acceptance. With a few exceptions (e.g., Hazer and Jacobson 2003;Rasmussen 1984), prior research has not posited how recruiters' preinterview perceptions and applicants' IM behavior interact to predict postinterview judgments. This gap in the research prompted us to develop a model based on the full range of IM tactics used in interviews to examine the hypothesized dynamics in the hotel context.…”

“…Second, following the suggestions of prior researchers (Harris 1989;Posthuma et al 2002), we incorporate the primary dimensions of an applicant's IM condition in the interview (i.e., applicant gender, proactive behaviors, and reactive behaviors) as moderators in our hypotheses and simultaneously compare their moderating effect with inferred abilities on the probability of acceptance. Finally, previous research on interviewers' use of résumé information and interviewee cues focused on specific IM behavioral patterns (Hazer and Jacobson 2003;Rasmussen 1984) or overall interview performance (Dalessio and Silverhart 1994;Kinicki et al 1990;Philips and Dipboye 1989;Wade and Kinicki 1995) rather than on the full range of influence tactics that captures the various purposes of applicants and the alternative means they use to influence recruiters to make a favorable decision. We adopt wellcategorized verbal IM typologies (Kacmar et al 1992;Stevens and Kristof 1995;Tedeschi and Melburg 1984) consisting of both the assertive and defensive IM tactics used by applicants with interviewers to design interview conditions that reflect applicants' strategic considerations when making their choice of imagemanipulating behavior so that the moderating role of each dimension of IM conditions can be compared.…”

“…Applicants' CAs have been considered as a leading predictor of their later job performance (Schmidt and Hunter 1998), and this common belief reinforces recruiters' inclination to accept applicants with high CAs (Chen et al 2011). Moreover, recruiters infer applicants' CAs based on educational background (e.g., job-related degree) and academic achievements (e.g., overall grade point average) (Brown and Campion 1994;Chen et al 2011;Cole et al 2007) from objective credentials which focus on nonsocial cues and do not need personal interpretations (Hazer and Jacobson 2003;Thoms et al 1999) and relate positively to recruiters' perceptions of the fit of applicant qualifications to job requirements (Kristof-Brown et al 2002;Tsai et al 2011), which, in turn, positively affects the acceptance decisions (Cable and Judge 1997;Higgins and Judge 2004). Consequently, the positive effect of recruiter-perceived CAs on hiring decision making should be prominent throughout the selection process.…”

“…Hotel recruiters rarely measure applicants' IAs accurately from résumé information (Chan and Kuok 2011) because typical résumé items fail to incorporate a complete profile of personality traits that reveal sufficient cues (Cole et al 2009) from which to confidently infer applicants' social skills (Foti and Hauenstein 2007). When recruiters feel uncertain about whether applicants have the IAs that are highly required in the service industry, they will seek more information until dyadic interactions occur during the interview, where applicants are allowed to demonstrate their communication-related skills using alternative influence tactics in order to persuade the recruiters that they have the required abilities (Hazer and Jacobson 2003;Rasmussen 1984). Thus, the effect of preinterview inferences about IAs on postinterview decisions should, to a degree, decrease after controlling for applicants' interview performance.…”