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

Abstract

In this paper, we discern the inclinations of recruiters and applicants towards recruitment channels. By drawing on a contextualized perspective of human resource management (HRM), we argue that a country's national institutional environment greatly influences the recruiters' choice of the recruitment channels and the applicants' attractiveness towards jobs. Using an experimental methodology (n = 200 graduate students) and by conducting in-depth interviews of 10 human resource managers, we found that a) although recruitment channels positively affect applicants' perceptions of organizational attractiveness, they have no significant impact on applicants' intentions to apply for the advertised jobs and b) even though online recruitment channels are widely believed to have a greater impact on organizational attractiveness, still recruiters in South Asia continue to prefer paperbased recruitment channels. The current study provides interesting insights into the process of recruitment by explicating that socio-cultural and economic context greatly shapes both the recruiters' and the applicants' preferences of recruitment channels.