An unanswered question in studies on recruiting in new ventures is how entrepreneurs can persuasively communicate to job seekers information about their ventures’ unique features to attract applicants. By building on nonverbal communication research, we investigate how verbally communicated product innovativeness and entrepreneurs’ nonverbal displays of passion affect applicant attraction both separately and in combination. We find applicant attraction is positively related to both communicated product innovativeness and entrepreneurs’ displays of moderate passion and negatively related to excessive displays of passion. Moreover, our findings suggest that displays of high passion distract job seekers from processing the semantic content of recruitment messages.

新企业招聘研究中的一个悬而未决的问题是企业家如何有说服力地向求职者传达有关其企业独特特征的信息以吸引求职者。通过以非语言交流研究为基础，我们调查了口头交流的产品创新性和企业家的非语言激情表现如何单独和组合地影响申请人的吸引力。我们发现求职者吸引力与传达的产品创新性和企业家适度热情的表现呈正相关，而与过度表现的热情呈负相关。此外，我们的研究结果表明，高度热情的表现会分散求职者处理招聘信息语义内容的注意力。