Have you ever helped job seekers get laser-focussed on the kinds of jobs they look for? You likely know that getting too focussed can limit opportunities yet looking too widely can yield all sorts of rejections or, worse, acceptance into ill-fitting work. Researchers at University of Waterloo have studied priming, or creating a mindset through an instruction or message, to help job seekers widen their job searches in productive ways.
Drewery, Pretti, and Nettinga recognized that inexperienced job seekers (e.g., post-secondary education students) take what appears to be a sensible approach to job search: Match one’s career interests to jobs and apply to those jobs rather than others. They also recognized that this approach, particularly among inexperienced job seekers, could eliminate desirable jobs for the person’s search. Drewery, et al. looked to research on helping job seekers become more open-minded about possible jobs and found that an “exploratory job search strategy” created more offers and higher quality jobs. What they didn’t find was a tested method for helping inexperienced job seekers become more open-minded. So, they developed and tested a method for doing so.
Drewery et al.’s approach to creating open-mindedness combined two ideas. One came from previous research led by Drewery that showed that early-career workers sometimes found jobs fulfilling even though these jobs did not align well with their career interests. The jobs were fulfilling because of the learning and development opportunities they provided: i.e., learning new skills made the jobs fulfilling. The other was the use of priming. With half of the 122 participants in their study, they provided the message that learning opportunities were important to satisfaction in the hopes that would make them more open-minded in their searches. They communicated the message through fictional reflections supposedly written by a person who had finished a similar educational program as the participant. In half the reflections, the idea of looking for learning opportunities when search for working was mentioned; in the other half it was not.
When participants were provided a fictitious set of jobs to apply for, those who were primed were more likely than those who were not primed to find relevance in job opportunities and therefore to apply for them.
Implication: Priming an idea can help adjust what students/clients pay attention to in their work searches. In this case, the source of the “prime,” a previous student who seemed to be similar to the study participant, was helpful in shifting participants’ attention. The message may not have been as effectively transmitted through a lecture or handout.
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