Motivational signals in public sector job advertisements and how they relate to attracting and hiring candidates
29 November 2023
Photo: Taylor & Francis Online
Prof. Dr. Dominik Vogel, together with colleagues from Denmark and the Netherlands, has produced a study on the motivational signals in public sector job advertisements and their effects.
Prof. Dr. Dominik Vogel, together with Dr. Matthias Döring and Dr. Martin Sievert created a study on "Motivational signals in public sector job advertisements and how they relate to attracting and hiring candidates".
This study examines how motivational signals in job advertisements impact public employers' hiring success, testing hypotheses derived from signaling theory and person-environment fit theory.
For this purpose, job advertisements collected via web crawling are combined with matched survey data on the recruitment process (1,863 recruiters) and thus the German labor market in the public sector is recorded.
Using quantitative text analysis, motivational signals are identified in job advertisements. The extent to which these are related to indicators of recruiting success is then analyzed.
The results show that prosocial signals have a positive effect on higher-quality applications and a more qualified selected candidate. In contrast, extrinsic and intrinsic motivational signals did not show statistically significant effects.
The article can be accessed here.