magazine issue 12 2006 / Issue 1

Not Again! I’m Looking for a Job but I Don’t Know Why It Is Taking So Long!

• written by Silvia Barriga

Job hunting is probably the type of experience we all have to face more than once in our life time. Intuitively we can think of the things that influence getting a job; we can blame our communicative skills, self-esteem, job skills, etc. We can also intuitively guess which of our characteristics will influence our job search behavior, while we can tell by our own experience what "post-feelings" occur after receiving a rejection.

So, why am I writing an article about job hunting, if we already know almost everything by experience? The reason is that there are some questions that we cannot answer intuitively, for example: What strategies do people use when hunting for jobs? How do these strategies affect getting a job faster? Which antecedents explain employment outcomes? And how do personality traits and foraging strategies affect our job search behavior?

A way to answer these questions is to address what  experimental research has shown through results that go beyond “intuitive outcomes”. The following article will explain the results of multiple studies regarding psychological variables that affect job search behavior such as  neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and  openness to experience. Such characteristics tap into individual differences found in foraging strategies when hunting for a job.

Job search behavior is the outcome of a dynamic, recursive, self-regulated process in which the individual must identify, initiate, and follow up written and social exchanges for the purpose of obtaining new employment or reemployment. As well, it is a purposive, volitional pattern of action that begins with the identification and commitment of pursuing an employment goal. During job search, people generally undertake an assortment of activities and use a variety of personal resources (e.g. time, effort, social resources) to obtain employment (Kanfer, Wanberg, & Kantrowitz, 2001).

Kanfer et al. (2001) posit in their  meta-analysis a heuristic model of job search (Figure 1) based on recent advancements on personality and motivation theory. Specifically, they base their model on results from (1) the personality-performance domain that show the effects of dispositional tendencies on self-regulated job behaviors (e.g. Barrick, Mount, & Strauss, 1993), (2) on the personality constructs drawn from theory and research on the five-factor model of personality – Big Five (Goldberg, 1990), and (3) on motivational constructs such as self-efficacy (Bandura, 1989) and employment attitudes (Feather, 1990).

Kanfer et al. (2001) identify six mayor complexes of nonability individual-difference variables that are likely to influence one or more of the constituent self-regulatory processes that in turn affect job search behavior. In sum, these complexes are: