The Importance of Personal Branding and Social Psychology in Recruitment - May The Odds Be Ever In Your Favour

Abstract: Media has during the past years paid more attention to the usage of personal branding while applying for a job. This thesis aims to investigate how business graduates' personal branding efforts are perceived by recruiters, while also researching what other factors that might influence the decision of inviting a candidate to a first interview or employing a candidate. By a qualitative pre-study and a quantitative main study, data was gathered on how important certain personal branding and social psychological factors are in the recruitment process. By six in-depth pre-study interviews and 239 respondents to the main study questionnaires, it is evident that different aspects of personal branding and social psychology are important for different types of recruiters, business fields and recruitment stages. Regardless of who and when this is received, skills and brand consistency are important personal branding aspects. The dominating factors within social psychology are personal chemistry between the candidate and the recruiter, and the recruiter's usage of intuition as a tool to decide. Similarity in personality between the candidate and the recruiter is commonly appreciated among recruiters since two out of three behave in this way, meaning that birds of a feather do flock together. Recruiters for Marketing & Sales positions evaluate creativity efforts higher than Accounting & Finance and Consulting. The latter values candidate personality of variety seeking to a higher extent, while Accounting & Finance shows the opposite. When investigating the differences between the two recruitment process stages, screening and final interview, the results show that most factors are more important during the final interview stage. There are however some exceptions, e.g. the candidate's usage of creativity differentiates more in the screening stage but is evaluated higher in the interview stage. Due to these results, implications can be extended to both managers and business graduates.