The nonlinear relationship between atypical applicant experience and hiring, with Mariano Heyden, Colin Lee, Will Felps, and Thomas Lee
Highlights
Hiring managers regularly encounter job applicants with atypical levels of experience across several common domains – e.g., occupational experience, general work experience, educational experience, and life experience. Surprisingly, few large-scale studies have investigated how hiring managers respond to applicants with atypical experience for the job, leaving a substantial lacuna in our knowledge. The primary goal of the current study is to examine the association between relative under- and over-experience in the aforementioned domains and the likelihood of applicants being subsequently interviewed and eventually hired. We draw on insights from attribution theory to introduce the concept of red flags in the judgment of applicant experience. In doing so we propose that hiring managers may avoid interviewing and hiring applicants with atypical experience relative to the applicant pool (i.e., relative over- or under-experience). Overall, our red flags perspective posits that job applicants with typical amounts of experience will be favored by hiring managers, which may be a useful lens for explaining why highly experienced applicants are not always considered. We test these predictions on a unique dataset parsed from 53,194 résumés and the corresponding application forms from 42 different organizations. Our results are broadly consistent with the red flags perspective, notably uncovering some intricate nonlinear effects. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.
Acknowledgments
In memoriam of Professor Thomas William Lee, Hughes M. Blake Endowed Professor of Management at the Foster School of Business at the University of Washington.
We are forever grateful for having had the opportunity to work with you. Your ideas and mentoring played an important role in the development of this research. Your grand contributions to the field of management, your genial manner, humility, wisdom, and unwavering kindness will continue to serve as an inspiration.
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Wechtler, H. M., Lee, C. I., Heyden, M. L., Felps, W., & Lee, T. W. (2021). The nonlinear relationship between atypical applicant experience and hiring: The red flags perspective. Journal of Applied Psychology.