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Do as your parents say?—Analyzing IT adoption influencing factors for full and under age applicants

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Abstract

The article suggests a model for examining the adoption of e-recruiting by individuals. The model is empirically evaluated using survey data from 323 full and under age applicants. The results explain substantial parts of the individual adoption decision. Interestingly, the relative importance of the adoption drivers varies with age, social environment and the level of education. While, as expected, overall Performance Expectancy is the major force behind adopting e-recruiting, the relative importance of the other factors differs a lot. Whereas Facilitating Conditions came out as an important driver for under age pupils, full age students by contrast are highly driven by the influence of their peer groups and the communication of the respective company they apply for. A major outcome is that the Subjective Norm of family and friends, teachers and professors has a weaker influence for under age pupils who mostly live with their parents than for the group of students who already left home to study at college. Consequentially we assume that the social influence of peer groups on an individual’s adoption differs with respect to age, social environment and level of education. This should be investigated more carefully in future adoption research as it might provide an answer for the varying significance of Subjective Norm in adoption research.

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Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge the constructive feedback provided by the senior editor, Yogesh K. Dwivedi, Michael D. Williams and Viswanath Venkatesh as well as the anonymous reviewers. The authors also thank Tim Weitzel and Daniel Beimborn for their helpful comments on the paper.

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Correspondence to Sven Laumer.

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Yogesh K. Dwivedi, Michael D. Williams and Viswanath Venkatesh were the guest editors accepting the article as part of the special issue on Adoption and Use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in the Residential/Household Context (See Dwivedi et al. 2008 for editorial).

Appendices

Appendix 1: Constructs and questions

Table 7 Construct indicators

Appendix 2: PLS measurement model

Table 8 Cross-loadings

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Laumer, S., Eckhardt, A. & Trunk, N. Do as your parents say?—Analyzing IT adoption influencing factors for full and under age applicants. Inf Syst Front 12, 169–183 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-008-9136-x

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