Publication
Motivational signals in public sector job advertisements and how they relate to attracting and hiring candidates
In this article, Martin Sievert, Dominik Vogel and Matthias Döring examine how motivational signals in job advertisements relate to public employers’ recruitment success, testing hypotheses derived from signalling theory and person – environment fit theory.
- Author
- Martin Sievert, Dominik Vogel and Matthias Döring
- Date
- 29 November 2023
- Links
- Read the full article here
In their research, Martin Sievert, Dominik Vogel and Matthias Döring combine job advertisements collected via web crawling with matched survey data on the recruitment process (1,863 recruiters), capturing Germany’s public sector job market. Using quantitative text analysis, they identify motivational signals in the job advertisements and analyse to what extent they relate to indicators of recruitment success.
Despite offering strict causal inferences, most (survey) experiments lack realism because they are not conducted in real labour markets. Descriptive studies score high on authenticity but lack meaningful dependent variables with correlational or causal inferences. Hence, there is a need to combine the external validity of studying real-world job advertisements with meaningful outcome measures in the labour market. This study addresses this research gap by focusing on motivational signals in real job advertisements combined with an analysis of how they relate to indicators of recruitment success. Specifically, the authors ask: How do motivational signals in public sector job advertisements relate to the subsequent number of applications, the quality of applications, and the quality of the selected candidate?
Results show that prosocial signals positively relate to a higher quality of applications and a more qualified selected candidate. By contrast, extrinsic and intrinsic motivational signals did not exhibit statistically significant effects.