Abstract
Although applicant self-reports of skills and experience are a core component of many selection methods (e.g., application blanks, resumes, biodata, online applicant tracking systems), applicant impression management (IM) on these types of assessments has generally been overlooked in the literature. Moreover, little research has examined the influence of contextual factors on within-person IM behaviors across time. This study applied the lens of expectancy theory to investigate how aspects of the application context—specifically time, information in the job ad, and verifiability—influenced IM on skill proficiency and experience measures over time. Using a sample of 1893 job applicants who had responded to 70 questions in relation to multiple job applications, we observed that applicants often change their responses to these questions across multiple applications, increasing and, in some cases, decreasing self-reported skills and experience. Longer job searches were positively associated with increases in self-reported skill proficiency and experience questions. Applicants were also likely to rate themselves more highly on questions assessing harder-to-verify skills and experience and were more likely to increase their reported years of experience over time for less verifiable questions. The findings have useful implications for researchers and practitioners, indicating that applicant job search length and question verifiability are contextual determinants of IM behavior on self-reported skills and experience assessments. Moreover, these findings are in line with valence-instrumentality-expectancy theory and dynamic models of applicant faking.
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17 October 2022
A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10869-022-09850-y
Notes
Ellingson and McFarland (2011) also note the role of between-person factors such as personality. However, because the focus in the present paper is primarily on within-person influences, we focus on these factors.
We examined the possibility that response changes were due to measurement error rather than deliberate responding to either manage impressions or reflect true skill improvement over time. If response changes were primarily due to measurement error, we would expect to see a random pattern of increasing and decreasing responses within applicants. To investigate this, we calculated the percentage of responses that increased, decreased, or stayed the same over time within each question and within in each applicant. Of the 2033 questions within 1893 applicants, there were 1165 cases (57.3%) where responses did not change over time, 134 cases (6.6%) were there were an equal number of increases and decreases (suggesting random responding), 449 cases (22.1%) where responses mostly increased over time, and 285 cases (14.0%) where responses mostly decreased over time. The results indicate that most of the response patterns over time were consistent (93.4% of cases either provided the same response, consistently increased, or consistently decreased over time), suggesting that most of the response changes were not due to random measurement error.
We do not report the magnitude of variance components for the years of experience models because the within-person variance is a constant in ordinal logistic regression.
An anonymous reviewer suggested that we explore the interaction between time in the job search and the number of applications submitted as both covariates may be a proxy for the valence of finding a new job. None of the interaction effects were statistically significant for any of the outcome variables: γ = − .009, p = .586 for the skill proficiency outcome; γ = .022, p = .364 for the years of experience outcome; γ = − .08, p = .363 for the skill proficiency decrease multinomial logistic regression outcome; γ = − .072, p = .435 for the skill proficiency increase outcome; γ = − .106, p = .134 for the years of experience decrease outcome; and γ = − .069, p = .395 for the years of experience increase outcome.
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Schmidt, J.A., Bourdage, J.S., Lukacik, ER. et al. The Role of Time, Skill Emphasis, and Verifiability in Job Applicants’ Self-Reported Skill and Experience. J Bus Psychol 39, 67–82 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10869-022-09847-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10869-022-09847-7