Applicant initial preferences: The relationship with job choices

Although the various factors that predict applicant attitudes and decisions during recruitment have been explored, far less is known about the decision-making process applicants go through to develop attitudes to facilitate job choice decisions. In a field sample (Study 1), applicant initial preferences across four firms predicted the trajectory of subsequent organizational attraction toward the firms over the 5-month recruiting cycle. Further, these initial preferences significantly predicted job choice decisions at the end of the recruiting cycle. Applicants' organizational attraction trajectories that developed during the entire recruiting process mediated this relationship. Findings in a laboratory sample (Study 2) were consistent with research on predecisional information distortion (PID). Applicants evaluated the information presented about two hypothetical recruiting companies and overly favored the company that was installed as applicants' initial preference. Initial preferences had a significant indirect effect on job choice through total PID when the information about the two companies was equivalent and when the initially preferred company was moderately worse. However, the indirect effect was not significant when the initially preferred company was presented as severely worse. Applicants arriving at job choice decisions using biased information evaluations driven by initial preferences can adversely affect both organizations and applicants' careers.