Recruiting in a Politically Divided Age

Political polarization among employees and applicants and the interaction of employee and organizational political ideology have considerable implications for how employees work together and how applicants may be attracted to or repelled from organizations trying to recruit them. In this chapter, we discuss political ideology as an important factor in the recruitment of employees into organizations and document evidence for increasing political polarization in the American public. We review the relatively limited research base on this topic and adjacent ones, and our review shows that organizational political ideology influences firm-level outcomes and applicant decision making, and that applicant political ideology influences organizational decision makers’ evaluations and decisions. Finally, we present a program of future research aimed at understanding how applicants combine organizational political ideology with other organizational attributes when making application decisions and job choices; how applicants make and use inferences about political ideology from their interactions with organizational representatives during recruitment; and how organizations can structure recruitment strategies to attract applicant pools that are politically homogenous, politically diverse, or apolitical.