Job preferences among young career entrants: Application intentions and evaluations of gender-related signals in job advertisements [before doctoral defense]

Kivonat, rövid leírás

Everybody is eager to find a ‘best fit’ job. Usually, the primary intention of an ambitious and goal-oriented individual is to find a well-suited occupation that guarantees financial stability, professional growth, and prosperous career opportunities. Through browsing possible career opportunities, job seekers encounter a vast number of job advertisements, which do not merely showcase a job description, but stand as a very first meeting point between the individual and an organisation. As a matter of fact, men and women are both integral parts of the labour market; hence, they are entitled to be given the same economic share and opportunities. Therefore, it became of focal interest what organisations communicate to possible candidates, and more importantly, what their explicit and implicit signals are through job advertising. The dissertation aims to present male and female differentiations within a broad spectrum, presenting the attitudinal and intention-based consequences of gender bias in organisational contexts. By conducting lab experiments, Chapman et al. (2005) found that more than 25 attributes are considered by job seekers when deciding about the level of attraction and likeability toward an organisation. Besides attributes, universally applied visual elements (e.g., logo, design, colour) and verbal elements (e.g., title, word embeddings, linguistic style) vary across job advertisements; hence, it can be hypothesised that the more diverse a job advertisement is, the more likely to gain a diverse pool of applicants. Although research areas, such as perceived applicant attraction (Arceo-Gomez et al., 2022; Castilla and Rho, 2023; Vervecken et al., 2013), the effects of gender-inclusive word embeddings (Hodel et al., 2017; Wille and Derous, 2018), male-female inequality in STEM fields (Hentschel et al., 2018) and perceived Person-Organization Fit (Hentschel et al., 2020; Horvath and Sczesny, 2015) have gained considerable attention in the field of career communication, it remains unexplored whether implicitly and explicitly perceived gender-related linguistic cues embedded in job advertisements influence job seeking university students’ attitude and application intention.