Web-based recruitment in the Millennial generation: Work–life balance, website usability, and organizational attraction

In this digital era, traditional recruitment efforts have increasingly been supplemented with or replaced by recruiting applicants on the Web. Concurrently, organizations are increasingly adapting to younger individuals from the Millennial generation as they enter the workforce. We combine these salient issues to examine Web-based recruitment of the Millennial generation by assessing predictors of organizational attraction. Using a sample of Millennials (N = 493), we found that perceptions of both work–life balance and website usability incrementally predicted attraction, when controlling for perceptions of other organization characteristics. In addition, person–organization fit mediated these relationships. These findings speak to the importance of examining how aspects of Web-based recruitment influence Millennial applicants. Keywords: AttractionMillennialsRecruitmentWebWork–life balance Notes 1We also tested the hypotheses after limiting the sample to only those individuals who were planning to apply for a job in the next year. The same results were found as those reported for the full sample. 2We conducted pilot testing by asking eight undergraduate and master's students to view the four organizational websites used in the present study. We selected four organizations from the pharmaceutical industry based on their presence on the current version of Fortune's "Most Admired" list. We chose the pharmaceutical industry because participants were not familiar with organizations in this industry (pilot testing yielded ratings of 1 or 2 on a 7-point scale related to familiarity). This lack of familiarity would better allow for individuals' perceptions of attraction to be influenced by the website rather than any previous experiences with the organizations. Second, pilot testing indicated that there was sufficient information available on the organizations' websites with regard to work–life balance. Specifically, across the four organizations' websites, the average rating was 5.3 on a 7-point scale in terms of sufficiency of work–life balance information available on the websites. Taking each organization's website individually, the scores ranged from 3.8 to 6.4 in terms of sufficiency of information available related to work–life balance. Since a one-way analysis of variance revealed a significant difference across the four organizations in terms of the amount of information available on the websites related to work–life balance, we controlled for condition (which website was viewed) in all analyses of the hypotheses. 3More details about these results are available from the first author.