Black White and read all over: Race differences in reactions to recruitment Web sites:

1. Black White and read all over: Race differences in reactions to recruitment Web sites: Joy Singleton Organizational Communication Professor Michael Schultz Winter Term 2012

2. Introduction: • An overall study contributes to practical and theoretical discoveries in lieu of internet recruiting and involvement of racial relations. Theoretical implications involved mental representation of what it would be like to work in a particular organization. Practical findings include recommendations to organizations on improvement of applicants’ attitude toward the organization, the intentions of job pursuit and to broaden how diverse their applicant pool is through company website interaction (Goldberg and Allen, 2008).

3. Theoretical Background The use of Web pages is attractive as a recruitment method because typically it involves lower costs while providing more information and more types of information than traditional recruitment communication methods.

4. Hypothesis: Attitude toward the organization will be positively related to intentions to pursue employment Engagement will be positively related to intentions to pursue employment through attitude toward the organization Parasocial interaction will be positively related to ease of use and usefulness

5. Hypothesis Contd’: Ease of use will be positively related to usefulness Website characteristics have contributed to affective reactions that are relatively interfaced

6. Race as a Moderator: • Moderating effects of race are critically important to organizations as they endeavor to recruit and hire from an increasingly diverse labor pool and attempt to develop a workforce that is representative of their communities and their customers. The study relative to recruiting websites found that after viewing certain websites, African Americans had less favorable assessments of organizations than did Caucasians. • The presence of lack of diversity statements represents race-relevant information in a job-seeking context. Therefore, the impact of the presence of diversity statements on engagement, attitude toward the organization, and intentions to pursue employment to be stronger for blacks than for whites.

7. Practicality of Implications Organizations using web sites for recruitment should not focus solely on content; but should draw from the literature on web design to ensure that job seekers find their sites easy to use and useful for their job search. Examining the effects of parasocial interaction on applicants’ job search self-efficacy, particularly across racial groups, may be a fruitful avenue for research.

8. Conclusion: Further research is needed to determine whether increasing the degree of parasocial interaction of other recruitment media has a similar effect on job seekers’ attitudes and intentions

9. References: • APA PsycNet.org. (February, 2012). Web-based recruitment: Effects of information, organizational brand, and attitudes toward a Web site on applicant attraction. Retrieved February 1, 2012 from website: http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=buy.optionToBuy&id=2007-16921-017 • Goldberg, C. B., & Allen, D. G. (2008). Black and white and read all over: Race differences in reactions to recruitment Web sites. Human Resource Management, 47(2), 217-236