Effectiveness of Specificity in Recruitment Advertising

The specificity ofjob descriptions and the specificity of applicant qualifications contained in fictitious recruitment advertisements were manipulated in this study to determine their effect on the probability of response. The subjects were two groups of senior-level engineering students who were designated as either qualified or unqualified (based on their cumulative grade point averages) for the jobs described in the ads. Questionnaires were used to gather data on the participants' evaluation (on a 7-point scale) of each ad in terms of the likelihood of their responding to it and its relative ranking. A repeated measures analysis of variance and summation of individual ranks were used to examine the data. Results indicated that specificity of applicant qualifications had a significant negative effect on probability of response for unqualified individuals.