Applicants’ perceptions of AI in personnel selection across Chile, Germany, and India

The increasing use of AI evaluations in personnel selection raises fundamental questions about how applicants interpret these recruitment signals in different institutional contexts. In particular, little is known about whether applicants across countries perceive AI evaluation in the same way. Drawing on signaling theory and North’s institutional perspective, we examine applicants’ perceptions of AI evaluation across Chile, Germany, and India, proposing that country-level differences in formal and informal factors shape applicants’ perceptions of opportunity to perform, consistency, innovativeness, and ultimately organizational attractiveness. Using a between-subjects vignette experiment (N = 252), we found that AI evaluation, compared to human evaluation, negatively affects perceived opportunity to perform and positively affects innovativeness. Both perceptions mediated the effect of AI evaluation on organizational attractiveness, whereas consistency did not. Applicants from Chile and India perceived AI evaluation as less consistent than those from Germany. Moreover, German applicants perceived AI as more innovative than Indian applicants, while no significant country-level differences emerged for opportunity to perform. Our findings advance theoretical understanding by showing that AI-based recruitment signals are interpreted differently across national contexts due to countries’ formal and informal factors, and practically highlight the need for organizations to tailor AI-based selection processes to sustain positive applicant perceptions.