Job Market Signaling in Public Administration

The public sector urgently needs more personnel and must actively engage with the labor market to distinguish itself from the private sector. Scholars recommend developing a strong “public service brand” and using sector-specific motives to attract individuals who prefer public sector employment. However, public-specific signaling often fails to attract a diverse range of applicants. This book examines the signaling strategies in public and private job advertisements and explores how the public sector can emulate private sector appeal while balancing personnel policy trade-offs involved with this manipulation. A linguistic analysis of 5,000 public and private job advertisements was performed to reveal significant sectoral differences in word choice and content emphasis. Further, a preregistered online survey experiment measured the intention to apply to job advertisements with varying signaling intensities. Therefore, this book enhances the understanding of recruitment messaging and strategies to bridge public-private sector differences.