Rowley, Shannon, J

Recruitment messaging is a critical aspect of attracting potential employees. This presentation delves into the nexus between recruitment messaging strategies and universal human needs, drawing upon Self-Determination Theory. Through qualitative and quantitative methods, including content analysis and survey data, the study investigates how various recruitment messages relate with intrinsic human motivations. Particularly, it examines career websites’ alignment of organizational offerings with fundamental psychological needs like autonomy, competence, and relatedness. By scrutinizing over 800 organizational career websites in Australia and the Netherlands (data collected by Digitaal-Werven & Talent Table) reveal common elements. This dataset serves as a foundation for further research (studies 2 & 3) to enhance the external validity of experiments, pinpointing which types of messaging about universal needs correlate with applicant attraction and recruitment. The initial study presented here gathers examples and employs a subset of questions from the original survey to evaluate organizational websites. Its aim is to discern how organizations convey their capacity to fulfill the universal needs of potential employees, offering insights crucial for optimizing recruitment messaging and bolstering organizational attraction and retention strategies.

1. Understand the significance of recruitment messaging in attracting quality applicants.
2. Explore the application of Self-Determination Theory in crafting effective recruitment strategies.
3. Develop an understanding of how organizations signal their capacity to meet universal needs of employees through their recruitment messaging on career websites and learn methods for evaluating organizational websites to discern these signals effectively.