The impact of specified professional development programme information as a marketing tool for effective recruitment

This study adopted a marketing strategy to enhance the recruiting outcome where the talent market is a product market and job applicants are consumers in the market. To examine the effect of the marketing strategy in recruiting talents concerning how job applicants might process recruiting messages, the study investigated the effect of promoting professional development programme using specific information as a recruiting tool to attract competent talents. An experimental design manipulating the amount of specific professional development programme information in a recruiting message was employed to test the influence on organizational attractiveness and job application intentions. The result indicated that specified professional development programme information significantly induced a stronger job application intention than a general description. The study further implied that disciplinary thinking outside of human resource frameworks (i.e. marketing strategy) could be adopted as a catalyst to facilitate the integration of human resource development and human resource management functions.