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Abstract
Recruitment is the primary method used to attract talent and draw human capital into the organization. Recruitment can be used to increase the pool of job applicants or to target potential applicants with specific skills and qualities. The effectiveness and utility of subsequent human resource activities, such as selection and training, depend heavily upon the quality and quantity of the applicants initially attracted to the organization by its recruitment efforts. Several recruitment scholars have suggested that organizations may be able to influence the quality or characteristics of the applicant pool by manipulating the content of information in recruitment messages. The ability of employees and management to comprehend many different cultural and emotional perspectives and the impact of those perspectives on interactions between individuals is critical to todays organizations in light of several recent trends. Thus, the ability to work, manage, and lead with multicultural and emotional competence is an important quality for organizations to consider when recruiting employees. The present study focuses on whether organizations can use recruitment literature to more effectively attract employees with multicultural readiness and emotional intelligence. More specifically, the study was designed to examine a) whether the content of organizational recruitment brochures could be manipulated to increase the attractiveness of the organization to potential employees and b) whether the relationship between organizational attraction and content of the recruitment brochure would vary as a function of either emotional intelligence or multicultural readiness. Sections of a recruitment brochure were manipulated to reflect three categories of content related to multicultural readiness (neutral/EEO statement, emphasis on valuing diverse perspectives, and opportunity to interact with diverse others) and four categories related to emotional intelligence (neutral statement about work environment, supportive employee culture, supportive leadership, and awareness of emotions). Three measures of organizational attraction were regressed on vectors representing the brochure conditions, measures of multicultural readiness and emotional intelligence, and vectors representing cross-products of interest. Results failed to support any of the hypotheses.