A note on recruiting sources and job survival rates.

Several recruiting sources for obtaining new workers used by an insurance company, a bank, and a professional abstracting service were compared in terms of their relationship to later job survival. Types of jobs studied included clerical, managerial, professional, and sales. Significant differences were found among the various recruiting sources in their relationship to later employee turnover. These findings are consistent with previous empirical results and suggest the importance of the area for further research. The empirical relationship between recruiting source and subsequent tenure with an organization has been investigated and reported in two separate articles (Gannon, 1971; Reid, 1972). The results suggest that applicants referred through informal methods (e.g., recommended by friends, relatives, or other employees) tend to remain with the organization longer than applicants recruited by means of formal methods (e.g., newspaper advertising and employment agencies). The purpose of this study was to test the generalizability of the findings from the Gannon and Reid studies to samples of employees collected several years later in order to assess the desirability of further psychological investigation of this phenomenon.