Chapter 2: Literature Review
Job seekers and self-presentation
One explanation for the behaviour of people in various social situations is provided by the script concept (Gioia & Poole, 1984), which considers context-specific norms that specify the impressions that people should convey of themselves (Leary, 1995), such as self-presentation in seeking a job (Marcus, 2009). The goal of self-presentation is to make others accept the images that individuals claim for themselves (Goffman, 1959). In the workforce recruiting context, job seekers must present themselves in accordance with a script and ensure that recruiters positively evaluate their image (Jansen et al., 2012; Lievens & Peeters, 2008).
A script is defined as a “schematic knowledge structure held in memory that specifies behaviour or event sequences that are appropriate for specific situations”
(Gioia & Poole, 1984). Scripts guide behaviour in many social situations, for instance, going to a restaurant, visiting the doctor, in performance appraisals, and in
conversations with the boss (Abelson, 1981). Scripts may also be considered as context-specific norms that specify the impressions people should convey of themselves (Leary, 1995).
Usually, a script is acquired through learning and experience (Gioia & Poole, 1984). Recruiters are typically trained in how to process in personnel selection situations, how to evaluate written job applications, and how to conduct job interviews. In other words, recruiters share their beliefs in the appropriateness of specific self-presentational behaviours. Job seekers are likely aware of the
expectations of recruiters. They may acquire this script through learning materials or
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their own experiences about job applications. Thus, job seekers have probably learned to present themselves in an appropriate way so that the probability to be hired is higher (Jansen, König, Stadelmann, & Kleinmann, 2012).
Consistent with the script concept, personal profile and résumé content are generally considered to be evidence of a job seeker’s employability (Breaugh, 2009;
Nemanick & Clark, 2002), and these features have become the most commonly used tools in personnel selection (Cole, Rubin, Feild, & Giles, 2007). Job seekers may acquire this script through self-help books or websites focusing on how to succeed in self-presentation with a strong profile and résumé (Tyler & McCullough, 2009).
Online communities such as LinkedIn have initiated a new era of workforce recruitment (Guillory & Hancock, 2012) in which recruiters are increasingly using these SNSs to source and screen job candidates (Davison et al., 2011), and job seekers are encouraged to create professional identities in combination with their personal profile and résumé content to enhance the likelihood that they will convey a positive impression in the new script (Caers & Castelyns, 2011). This new script may also influence whether job seekers meet recruiters’ expectations in online communities (Bohnert & Ross, 2010; Damnianović et al., 2012).
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Self-presentation and online communities
Online communities are actually online manifestations of physical communities, despite their strong reliance on technology and physical distance between participants (Daneshgar & Ho, 2008). When people become members of a community, they must select the relevant and appropriate pieces of information for their self-presentation to be consistent with the script for the group (Hornsey, Grice, Jetten, Paulsen, & Callan, 2007).
When people become members of a community, usually the first step is to fill out a member profile, deciding to which extent they want to become visible to the group and which impression they want to convey. It is a key premise in
self-presentation research that people want to be liked by their audience and want to get the audience to think favourably of themselves (Baumeister, 1982). People must select those pieces of information for their self-presentation that are relevant and appropriate in the given situation (Leary, 1993).
Managing self-presentation in online communities is an integral part of private and professional life (Rui & Stefanone, 2013). However, the willingness to provide personal information in member profiles on these SNSs is generally high because members gain acceptance through extensive self-presentation that facilitates the establishment of relationships with other network members (Schwämmlein &
Wodzicki, 2012).
The first SNS, Classmates.com, was established in 1995 (Cashmore, 2007). It provided a means by which geographically dispersed graduates of specific schools
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could reintroduce themselves and initiate communications. Three years later, the first business-oriented SNS—eademy—was created. The purpose of this U.K.-based enterprise was to offer a forum in which employees throughout the world could locate former colleagues or forge new relationships with professionals who might share expertise or serve as useful contacts for sales or other business-related activities.
Since then, at least 10 major business-oriented SNSs have emerged, the largest being LinkedIn (DeKay, 2009), which maintains a membership of more than 347 million members in over 200 countries and territories at the end of 2014, according to the LinkedIn official website.
van Dijck (2013) found that a LinkedIn profile can be used to shape an idealised portrait of one’s professional identity by displaying skills to peers and anonymous evaluators. LinkedIn asked members not to provide their life story but to highlight specific skills, thus promoting their strengths for different business
stakeholders. Members were also urged to complete their profiles with
recommendations or statements from colleagues or clients praising their performance or competencies. A member’s professional identity might also receive a boost from contributing to the Question and Answer space provided by the SNS (Raban, 2009), which is typically called a ‘post and comment’. Accordingly, withholding personal information appeared to be incompatible with the key motivations for joining these online communities (Debatin, Lovejoy, Horn, & Hughes, 2009). In other words, the large amount of information disclosed on these SNS might be a response to the CMC environment, which made the goal of building self-presentation salient, particularly for job seekers (Dekay, 2009).
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Self-presentation in online communities for job seekers
The use of SNS for recruiting seems to be widely accepted because of its close relation to the act of posting a job advertisement on the Internet. This type of activity just posts the advertisement on an online community (e.g., LinkedIn) that has even added classified sections for job seekers and job posters (Davison et al., 2011).
LinkedIn allows users to research companies with which they may be interested in working. When typing the name of a given company in the search box, statistics about the company are provided. These may include the ratio of female to male employees, the percentage of the most common titles/positions held within the company, the location of the company's headquarters and offices, or a list of present and former employees (DeKay, 2009).
Because using these online communities can allow for more targeted recruiting (i.e., applicants may be identified by certain characteristics), it is possible that using some SNSs may produce more qualified applicants. Also, many organizations use these SNSs to identify passive job-seekers (SHRM Staffing Research 2008), who use the websites to indicate that they are interested in and available for certain job
positions and occupations (Davison et al., 2011).
Individuals essentially create online resumes with their job histories and qualifications. The linked online community enhances this content by connecting the information to other professionals, companies, and interest groups. The basic profile consists of a summary of the individual's skills, experience, and education, all very similar to a professional resume. The online community allows for more flexibility in the types of content one can include and more creativity in the way the content is
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displayed. The profile reveals much more information than a cover letter and resume.
Depending on the content the user chooses to include, a profile may or may not be related to an individual's professional qualifications (Fawley, 2013).
A traditional resume or curriculum vitae is a document created to indicate that an individual has the education and experience to do a job. In LinkedIn, users can include a photograph, write a short blurb attesting to their expertise, and add media links that share presentations, digital portfolios, or a list of books they are reading.
Personal interests and the LinkedIn groups and associations to which a person belongs are part of the profile, as are the reasons someone may be contacted, such as career opportunities, new ventures, or "getting back in touch." Individuals may enhance their profiles to achieve a desired goal in the same way that a resume can be bolstered to improve the chances of getting an interview (Fawley, 2013).
Consistent with Goffman (1959), members in online communities have various socio-discursive needs – expressive, communicative, or promotional – that reflect the need for different personas and that necessitate different addresses.
Although gaining employment is often a goal of self-presentation, it is not the
exclusive goal; people engage in self-presentation for many social reasons, including to conduct business, to establish friendships, or simply to express themselves
(Shepherd, 2005). Consequently, difficulties may arise when a person wishes to create multiple impressions for different audiences online (Labrecque et al., 2011). Failures may also become clear if a job seeker’s online self-presentation does not match a recruiter’s expectations (Bohnert & Ross, 2010). Because personal goals affect self-presentation in online communities, it is important for job seekers to provide
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information related to specific topics and recruiter interests that may enhance the likelihood of obtaining hiring recommendations (Schwämmlein & Wodzicki, 2012).
Erving Goffman (1959) theorized self-presentation as a performance; the need for a multiple, composite self has only increased since public communication moved to an online space. This article will analysis how the job seekers’ self-presentations influence recruiters’ perceptions based on the job seeker’s LinkedIn profile with different self-presented categories.
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Job seekers’ self-presentation and hiring recommendations
Because a job seeker’s self-presentation in an online community contains a wide range of information (Rosenberg & Egbert, 2011), how recruiters perceive and make decisions based on that information is critical to the hiring process (Caers &
Castelyns, 2011). The theory of person–environment fit (Kristof-Brown, Zimmerman,
& Johnson, 2005) and the elaboration likelihood model (ELM; Petty & Cacioppo, 1986) may help determine whether job seekers’ online self-presentation can predict recruiters’ hiring recommendations (Dineen, Noe, & Ash, 2002).
Tsai, Chi, Huang, and Hsu (2011) found that a job seeker can influence recruiter evaluations through impression management. Although the effect of applicant impression management has been studied primarily in the context of employment interviews (e.g., Jansen et al., 2012), researchers have noted that job seekers may employ online impression management tactics to create a desirable image (Guillory & Hancock, 2012). Job seekers can affect recruiters’ person–
environment fit perceptions by promoting themselves (Sekiguchi, 2007), which can in turn increase their opportunities to be offered subsequent job interviews or the job itself (Higgins & Judge, 2004). Person–environment fit generally refers to the compatibility between individual and work environment characteristics (Kristof-Brown et al., 2005). Person–environment fit encompasses a variety of manifestations, and fit between an employee and the work environment has been shown to increase the likelihood of maximum work efficiency (Caplan & Harrison, 1993). The person–
environment fit literature highlights the attraction aspect of both Schneider’s (1987) attraction–selection–attrition model and Byrne’s (1971) similarity–attraction
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paradigm and suggests that people are attracted to organisations that have characteristics congruent with their own.
Attraction–selection–attrition model assumes that individuals’ characteristics are the basic ingredients of existing organizational culture. This implies that the match between individuals and their organization also should refer to the match between individuals’ characteristics and the characteristics of others in the organization (Schneider, Smith, Taylor, & Fleenor, 1998). Two of the most commonly examined aspects of person–environment fit are person-job (P–J) fit and person–organisation (P–O) fit (Gregory, Meade, & Thompson, 2013). Recruiters’ perceptions of P–J and P–O fit were examined by Kristof-Brown (2000), who demonstrated that while highly correlated each contributed uniquely to predicting hiring recommendations.
P–J fit is defined as the match between the abilities of a person and the demands of a job or the needs/desires of a person and what is provided by a job (Edwards, 1991). The concept of P–J fit is the traditional foundation for employee selection (Werbel & Gilliland, 1999). P–O fit is “the compatibility between people and organisations that occurs when at least one entity provides what the other needs, they share similar fundamental characteristics, or both” (Kristof, 1996). This
definition focuses on fit of the person with the whole organisation rather than a specific job, vocation, or group (Kristof, 1996).
Moreover, people like and are attracted to others who are similar, rather than dissimilar, to themselves (Byrne, 1971). Previous similarity–attraction effect
manipulations include personality traits (Banikiotes & Neimeyer, 1981), attitudes (Yeong Tan & Singh, 1995), ethnic backgrounds (Hu, Thomas, & Lance, 2008), and
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facial features (Bailenson, Iyengar, Yee, & Collins, 2008), among others. A popular explanation for similarity-attraction put forward by Byrne and Clore (1970) is based on people's need for accuracy: “Finding people who share similar attitudes or background corroborates one's own beliefs and as such, positively enforces one's feeling of accuracy”. Compared with the P–J and P–O fit, Person-Person (P–P) Fit (P–P) has been relatively neglected in selection research (Tsai et al., 2011). The theoretical base underlying P–P fit emphasizes effects of similarity (i.e., the optimal fit between preferences of people) or dissimilarity and considers the direction of dissimilarity to be irrelevant (Van Vianen, 2000).
Self-presentation is a key process of argument and persuasion aimed at making a desired impression on a particular audience in an online community (Rosenberg &
Egbert, 2011). The ELM is a theory of the processes responsible for yielding to persuasive communication (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986) and can be used to explain how job seekers’ self-presentations influence recruiters’ hiring recommendations (Forret &
Turban, 1996). The ELM posits that information that is more relevant to the message topic is more likely to be processed via a ‘central’ route in which the merits of the information are deliberately evaluated; that is, presented information is critically evaluated and judged on the merit of its content. By contrast, less relevant information is more likely to be processed via a ‘peripheral’ route in which more superficial cues play a larger role in attitude formation (Gregory et al., 2013). The central and
peripheral routes to persuasion are not exhaustive and are not mutually exclusive categories of persuasion (O'Keefe, 2002), and people may engage in both central and peripheral processing simultaneously (Choi & Salmon, 2003).
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Forret and Turban (1996) argued that the use of central routes for information, such as P–J fit and P–O fit, enables recruiters to process job seekers' qualifications more thoroughly, resulting in greater discrimination between more and less qualified applicants. However, when necessary job information is lacking, recruiters' ability to discriminate between applicants on the basis of qualifications is reduced, and
recruiters will tend to rely more on peripheral route information that is irrelevant to organisational performance, such as P–P fit.
ELM acknowledges that argument quality and source credibility are key determinants of persuasion outcomes (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986). Argument quality should be defined and assessed in terms of the presence of and relationships among rational assertions (Boller, Swasy, & Munch, 1990); source credibility refers to the extent to which the source of a persuasive message is perceived to be capable of making correct assertions (Pornpitakpan, 2004). Mak, Schmitt, and Lyytinen (1997) proposed that source credibility has been regarded as one of the major peripheral cues, whereas the strength of argument quality has been found to be a critical factor for central route messages. In other words, an individual with central route information processing is always influenced by argument quality, whereas an individual with peripheral route information processing is always persuaded by source credibility (Li, 2013).
In line with person–environment fit, P–O and P–J fit are relevant information in the context of job recruiting and will be processed by a central route that is always influenced by argument quality, whereas P–P fit is irrelevant information and will be processed by a peripheral route that is always influenced by source credibility.
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Because argument quality and source credibility have positive effects on perceived online information quality (Yi, Yoon, & Davis, 2013), we predicted that job seekers in an online community would be perceived as having P–J and P–O fit when their self-presentations have high argument quality and that their self-presentations would be perceived as having P–P fit when they have high source credibility. We therefore proposed that a recruiter’s perceptions of the argument quality and source expertise of a job seeker’s self-presentation in an online community would mediate the
relationship between a job seeker’s self-presentation and P–J/P–O fit, on the one hand, and P–P fit, on the other hand, and would therefore influence recruiter hiring
recommendations.
Hypothesis 1(H1): The argument quality of a job seeker’s self-presentation will positively affect recruiters’ perceptions of P–J fit.
Hypothesis 2(H2): The argument quality of a job seeker’s self-presentation will positively affect recruiters’ perceptions of P–O fit.
Hypothesis 3(H3): The source credibility of a job seeker’s self-presentation will positively affect recruiters’ perceptions of P–P fit.
After evaluating the job seekers’ P–J/P–O/P–P fit, recruiters will then decide whether or not to recommend these job seekers for hire. P–J fit is concerned with the fit between applicants’ knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) and the job
requirements for future performance (Higgins & Judge, 2004). Because P–J fit has been shown to predict a job seeker’s future task performance (Kristof-Brown et al., 2005), recruiters are motivated to match job seekers’ KSAs with job requirements during the candidate screening processes through SNSs (Roulin & Bangerter, 2013).
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Therefore, recruiters’ evaluations of P–J fit based on job seekers’ self-presentations tend to have positive effects on hiring recommendations (Kristof-Brown, 2000). Thus, this study proposes the following:
Hypothesis 4(H4): Recruiters’ perceptions of P–J fit based on job seekers’ self-presentation will positively affect hiring recommendations.
P–O fit is concerned with the compatibility between applicants and
organisational characteristics for value congruence (Piasentin & Chapman, 2007).
Research has consistently found that selecting applicants with high levels of P–O fit can predict not only lower levels of turnover intention and absenteeism (Arthur, Bell, Villado, & Doverspike, 2006) but also higher levels of job satisfaction, organisational commitment, and organisational citizenship behaviour (Wei, 2012). Because
perceived P–O fit is a measure of an individual’s perceived congruence with an organisation (Kristof-Brown, 2000), job seekers’ self-presentation as provided on a SNS may allow recruiters to determine whether the job seekers’ personal
characteristics fit well with an organisation’s characteristics (Roulin & Bangerter, 2013). Therefore, we propose the following:
Hypothesis 5(H5): Recruiters’ perceptions of P-O fit based on job seekers’ self-presentation will positively affect hiring recommendations.
Research has found that hiring decisions are made based on both objective qualifications (e.g., P–J fit and P–O fit) and subjective impressions (e.g., Wade &
Kinicki, 1997). Subjective impressions affect hiring recommendations significantly more than objective qualifications because of an affective effect (Roebken, 2010) or unavoidable prejudices (Lodato, Highhouse, & Brooks, 2011) that may be unrelated
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to job or organisational performance (Highhouse, 2008). Research evidence indicates that recruiters give subjectively desirable applicants more favourable evaluations than subjectively undesirable applicants and that subjective impressions increase recruiters’
perceived person-person (P–P) fit, thereby influencing hiring recommendations (e.g., Davison et al., 2011).
For example, job seekers’ opinions or background information may enhance recruiters’ “similarity–attraction” or affective effects toward these applicants, which might increase recruiters’ intentions to hire the applicants (Rynes, Barber, & Varma, 2000). As a result, job seekers presenting attributes that are more desirable to
recruiters will likely be considered ideal employees by such recruiters (Garcia, Posthuma, & Colella, 2008). Kaptein, Castaneda, Fernandez, and Nass (2014) found that similarity-attraction can have positive effects on people's evaluations of others in online communities. Based on these arguments, we propose the following:
Hypothesis 6(H6): Recruiters’ perceptions of P-P fit based on job seekers’ self-presentation will positively affect hiring recommendations.
Based on these six hypothesises, the study develops the conceptual framework that is shown in figure 1 to explain how a job seeker’s self-presentation affects
recruiter hiring recommendations and to identify the factors of effective self-presentation in online communities that lead to a hiring recommendation. The hypothesised relationships are based on person–environment fit theory and the ELM as discussed in previous reviewing section.
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Figure 1. The conceptual model of job seeker’s self-presentation and recruiter hiring recommendation in online communities
Perceived P-J Fit
Recruiter Hiring Recommendation Perceived P-O Fit
Argument Quality
Perceived P-P Fit Source Credibility
Self-Presentation in Online Communities
H1
H2
H3
H4
H5
H6
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Chapter 3: Research Method