Business Candidate Reactions to Community College Recruitment Practices: Effects of Instructional Programs and Job Attributes.

This paper draws on the literatures of educational administration, management, and marketing to address, empirically, two issues related to community college faculty recruitment: (a) factors influencing faculty application decisions, and (b) the utility of an existing model for recruiting community college faculty. It examines factors influencing job applicant decisions, and discusses recruitment-as-job-marketing as a model for recruiting experienced educators. The report highlights three advancements achieved by the present investigation. First, the study responded to the call for additional research about recruitment practices prior to the initial employment interview. Second, this study focused on the effectiveness objective of faculty recruitment (to maximize the size of the applicant pool) via an empirical investigation. The third advancement was application of a specified recruitment model to the community college context. This paper addresses whether or not organizational characteristics and job attributes described in recruitment advertisements influence the reactions of applicants for community college business faculty positions. Marketing theory and a specified recruitment model framed a laboratory experiment (3 X 3 ANOVA design) assessing reactions to community college faculty recruitment advertisements varied according to instructional program and job attribute content. Applicants for a business faculty position reacted most favorably to recruitment advertisements containing academic transfer program content. Implications for theory and practice are discussed. Contains 30 references. (VWC) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document.