Social Media Recruitment: Communication Characteristics and Sought Gratifications

Abstract

This study examines how social media pages can be used to influence potential applicants’ attraction. Based on the uses and gratifications theory, this study examines whether organizations can manipulate the communication characteristics informativeness and social presence on their social media page to positively affect organizational attractiveness. Moreover, we examine whether job applicants’ sought gratifications on social media influence these effects. A 2 × 2 between-subjects experimental design is used. The findings show that organizations can manipulate informativeness and social presence on their social media. The effect of manipulated informativeness on organizational attractiveness depends on the level of manipulated social presence. When social presence was high, informativeness positively affected organizational attractiveness. This positive effect was found regardless of participants’ sought utilitarian gratification. Social presence had no significant main effect on organizational attractiveness. There was some evidence that the effect of social presence differed for different levels of social gratification.

I want to work there: how public relations agencies communicate organizational culture and identity on Instagram

“…Organizations should incorporate social media into internal communication strategies and existing employee recruitment strategies (Aggerholm and Andersen, 2018;Ewing et al, 2019;Gibbs et al, 2015;Hunt, 2010;Villeda and McCamey, 2019). Prior research has focused on how organizations use social media to guide decision makingan organization using a candidate's social media account as part of the screening process, for instance (see Carpentier et al, 2019;Muduli and Trivedi, 2020;Slovensky and Ross, 2012). Though limited, there has been some scholarly work on the organizational use of social media employee recruitment.…”

“…Though limited, there has been some scholarly work on the organizational use of social media employee recruitment. For example, studies have found that using social media as an organizational branding tool results in improved organizational attractiveness (Carpentier et al, 2017) especially when the profiles include relevant job information (Carpentier et al, 2019). Social media can be a useful tool for improving an organization's image and application intentions (Kissel and B€ uttgen, 2015), corporate reputation (Sivertzen et al, 2013) and reaching younger applicants (Villeda and McCamey, 2019).…”

“…Social media can be a useful tool for improving an organization's image and application intentions (Kissel and B€ uttgen, 2015), corporate reputation (Sivertzen et al, 2013) and reaching younger applicants (Villeda and McCamey, 2019). Carpentier et al (2019) suggest that employers use social media to communicate information about "the company's current employees, its culture, the vacancies, and the selection process. .…”

KNOWCON 2021. Knowledge on Economics and Management: Conference Proceedings

“…Building a social media community is an essential part of e-recruiting (Rodríguez-Sánchez et al, 2019). Sharing relevant information about daily life at a company improves an employer's attractiveness to candidates, especially when this content is delivered in a personable manner (Carpentier et al, 2019). Social media is a new communication channel between an employer and job applicants that can create a basic form of meaningful hiring communication (Aggerholm & Andersen, 2018).…”

The Effect of Different Rejection Letters on Applicants’ Reactions

“…The empirical evidence seems to suggest that variables of different nature affect applicant perceptions of the selection process [11,14,17,18]: The applicant characteristics (e.g., work experience, personality, age) [32], perceptions of procedure characteristics (e.g., transparency, length of process, recruitment media) [33,34,35] and job characteristics (e.g., attractiveness, requirements) influence applicant reactions in terms of fairness and perceived procedural justice, which, in turn, influence applicant outcomes (in term of organisational recommendation, satisfaction, performance) [20], with potential outcomes in terms of future job identity [36].…”