EMPLOYEE-RECRUITER MATCHING : A quantitative study about students’ perceptions and recruiters’ wants

Recruiters are hiring people with the right set of skills and attributes in order to fit the demands of the company. Simultaneously, students who decide to invest in a university education are most likely doing it for one major reason – to become more attractive in the labor market. A problem arose concerning whether there is a discrepancy between students’ perceptions of sought employee attributes and wanted attributes by recruiters, or not. Therefore, the current study aimed at assessing the discrepancy between the employee attributes that employers want, and students’ perceptions of sought employee attributes. Available literature within the field was reviewed, resulting in an identified research gap which led to a research question as well as four stated hypotheses. Methodology wise, a pre-study was conducted in the current research which had a qualitative approach in order to construct the questionnaires for the main part of the study, which had a quantitative approach. The questionnaires were answered by 83 students and 126 recruiters. The results from the study showed that discrepancies exist concerning 10 of 26 measured attributes. Students perceived interpersonal skills, teamwork, knowledge about the market, gender, and well formulated CV and personal letter to be more important than recruiter considered them to be. Moreover, recruiters considered self-management, commitment, responsibility, self-awareness, and physical well-being to be more important than students perceived them to be.