Do Interactive Experiences Aid Employee Recruitment?

Many modern organizations try to compete for top talent by adding fancy, interactive experiences to their recruitment process – think of something like a virtual tour.  Such interactive experiences are expensive, but their creators hope that they will attract a higher class of recruit.  New research from Badger, Kaminsky and Behrend1 in the Journal of Managerial Psychology explores the impact of such media on some recruitment-related outcomes, concluding that highly demanding interactive recruitment activities are likely to harm how well recruits remember important information and do not provide other benefits.

To understand why this might be the case, you must first understand that there are two competing arguments about interactive experiences in recruitment.  On one hand, media richness theory suggests that richer communication techniques lead to more accurate beliefs and know more about organizations when recruited through richer means.  Often, this is done in comparisons of face-to-face recruitment versus computer-mediated; in general, face-to-face is better.  If media richness is really the mechanism behind such gains, we would also expected richer media to be richer than other media – for example, 3D virtual worlds should produce better recruitment outcomes than an ordinary website.

On the other hand, cognitive load theory suggests that humans have a finite amount of cognitive resources from which they must draw.  If overdrawn – for example by having too many mental demands simultaneously – then we’d expect recruitment outcomes to be worse with richer environments.  If cognitive load theory is correct, that same 3D virtual world should produce worse recruitment outcomes than an ordinary website.

The researchers furthermore distinguished between the types of outcomes each theory speaks best to.  Media richness theory speaks more to affective reactions – richer media lead to a feeling of greater affiliation and understanding of company culture.  Cognitive load theory speaks more to cognitive outcomes – higher loads lead to less information remembered.

To test these ideas, the researchers conducted a quasi-experiment of 471 MTurk workers to experience either a traditional website or an interactive recruitment experience in the 3D virtual world, Second Life.

Using path analysis, the researcher concluded from their quasi-experiment that the richer media environment did indeed reduce how well participants remembered the recruitment message.  They also found that this was mediated by the experience of increased cognitive load, supporting cognitive load theory.  There was no effect on culture-related information.

Overall, this supports cognitive load theory as the more relevant theory for studying the role of technology in recruitment outcomes, at least in regards to Second Life.  Although the experience of Second Life was certainly richer, it was also much more demanding, which overrode any potential benefits.  What this study does not speak to are innovative interactive experiences that are a little less demanding – like online recruitment games.  Such games, or other such experiences, may strike a better balance between cognitive load and media richness, but are left for future research.

1. Badger, J.M., Kaminsky, S.E., & Behrend, T.S. (2014). Media richness and information acquisition in internet recruitment Journal of Managerial Psychology, 29 (7), 866-883 : 10.1108/JMP-05-2012-0155 [↩]