Priming the Pipeline: A Relational View of Attracting Career-ready Students

Despite extensive progress explaining how a broad range of factors influence attraction, the literature has not yet considered how interorganizational ties of varying intensity influence attraction. This paper addresses this gap by framing attraction from a relational perspective, focusing on interorganizational relationships and the discontinuous role transitions these relationships aim to facilitate. We develop hypotheses about how variations in these and related factors predict organizational attraction and test the hypotheses using a sample of students from a large U.S. university who face the discontinuous role transition from student to career employee. We find that, in some cases, interorganizational relationships can yield attraction advantages comparable to the attraction advantages prominent brands enjoy and provide nuanced guidance for when relational embedding is most (least) effective. The paper closes with the nuanced implications for research and practice and—to further the relational movement—a primer on how to shift from atomistic to relational perspectives of HRM phenomena.