How Much Does the Recruitment Channel Really Matter: Recruiters’ and Applicants’ Behaviors in the South Asian Context

Abstract

In this paper, we discern recruiters’ and applicants’ tendencies towards recruitment channels. By drawing on the contextual perspective of human resource management (HRM), we argue that the national institutional environment of a country greatly influences recruiters’ choices of recruitment channels and applicants’ level of attractiveness towards jobs. Using an experimental study (n = 200 graduate students) and in-depth interviews of 10 human resource managers, we find that a) although recruitment channels positively affect applicants’ perceptions of organizational attractiveness, they have no significant impact on applicants’ intentions to apply for the job and b) even though online recruitment channels are widely believed to have a greater impact on organizational attractiveness, recruiters in the south Asian context continue to prefer the paper-based recruitment channels. The study provides interesting insights for recruitment literature, by explicating that socio-cultural and economic context enormously shapes recruiters’ and applicants’ preferences of recruitment channels.