Abstract
Providing feedback to job applicants is an important part of the selection process, regardless of whether applicants are selected for the job. The goal of this study was to examine the extent to which providing post-test feedback to rejected applicants on their personality test scores using absolute (i.e., overall scores) or social-comparative techniques (i.e., scores that provide information on how you compare to others) can influence applicant feedback perceptions and their behavioral intentions. This was accomplished by studying 181 test-takers within a job application simulation. Results indicated that test-takers who received absolute feedback perceived it as fairer and were more likely to recommend the organization to others than test-takers who received social-comparative feedback. Further, feedback fairness mediated the relationship between the feedback conditions and each behavioral intention, including recommendation intentions, consumer purchase intentions, and litigation intentions. We discuss several implications for research and practice, as well as future research directions.
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Notes
This six-month delay reflects the time taken to receive ethics approval to deploy the second portion of the study and is not reflective of an intentional delay or design decision by the researchers.
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This research was supported by awards from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to Justin R. Feeney (Grant #: 430-2019-00080), Julie M. McCarthy and Richard D. Goffin.
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Feeney, J.R., McCarthy, J.M., Daljeet, K.N. et al. Simulated job applicant test-taker reactions to rejection: comparing absolute and social-comparative feedback. Curr Psychol 43, 3714–3726 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-023-04599-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-023-04599-w