Job seekers perception of diversity statements in the company’s job vacancies

Doing business in the modern age has its challenges and opportunities. With the processes of globalization and migration of resources and information, human resources are also affected by the changes on the market. The current labor market is more diversified than ever before. In order to comply with the changes in the potential employee pool, companies have to take on an important challenge. Many scholars highlight the need to include diversity in the company’s core business and focus on the process of attracting and retaining employees that make up the majority and minority groups. In order to attract members of culturally diverse groups, reveal the company’s way of looking at the diversity and practicing it at the workplace, many companies generate diversity statements. After choosing the diversity statement that the company is following and communicating, the diversity statement is often included in the company’s job vacancies. The objective of this research is to test whether culturally diverse job seekers will be attracted to the job vacancies that have different diversity perspective communications or more specifically will their intention to apply to those job vacancies differ. To find out if the job seekers perspective of different diversity communication in the job vacancies will influence the intention to apply to that job vacancy and how will that relationship be moderated by the job seekers cultural dimensions, an online survey experiment with a between-subject design was generated. The experiment with four conditions was distributed and a total of 151 valid responses was gathered. The participants were randomly divided among four conditions that presented three diversity perspective communications from Ely and Thomas research and one control condition. Moderation was implemented to the research model and defined by the societal culture dimensions from the Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness research program. The results suggest that the dimensions of institutional collectivism and in-group collectivism do influence the job seekers perception of the diversity communication in the job vacancy and their intention to apply to those job vacancies, while the other four tested dimensions failed to show the influence. This study contributes to the field of job vacancy perception by the culturally diverse job seekers regarding the diversity communication content in job vacancies and suggests more research on this contemporary topic.