Research on employee recruitments so many studies, so many remaining questions

Over the last thirty years, the amount of research on recruitment topics ha s increased dramatically. Despite this increase, recent reviews of the recr uitment literature often have had a somewhat pessimistic tone. Reviewers ha ve concluded that we still do not know a great deal about why recruitment a ctivities have the effects they do. In particular, recent reviews have crit icized many of the studies conducted for being poorly designed, narrow in f ocus, and not grounded in theory. We believe that many of these criticisms are legitimate. We also believe that, in order for future studies to result in a better understanding of the recruitment process, such studies need to be designed with an appreciation of the complexity of the recruitment proc ess (i.e., the number of variables involved and the nature of their relatio nships). In this regard, we offer an organizing framework of the recruitmen t process. In introducing this framework, we draw upon theories from a vari ety of research domains and give considerable attention to process variable s (e.g., applicant attention, message credibility, applicant self-insight) that mediate the relationships between recruitment activities (e.g., recrui ter behavior) and recruitment outcomes (e.g., the number of applications ge nerated). Having introduced an organizing framework, we selectively review recruitment research, giving particular attention to the topics of recruitm ent sources, recruiters, and realistic job previews. This review makes appa rent a number of important issues that recruitment research has yet to addr ess. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.