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Mirage: Rejected Internal Applicants Twice As Likely To Quit
Originally found at Mirage News.
Internal job applicants who face rejection are nearly twice as likely to leave their organizations than those who were either hired for an internal job or had not applied for a new job at all.
According to new research from JR Keller, assistant professor of human resource studies at the ILR School, firms can systematically reduce the likelihood that rejected candidates will exit by being strategic when considering which employees are interviewed.
In their paper, “Turned Down and Taking Off? Rejection and Turnover in Internal Talent Markets,” published by the Academy of Management Journal, Keller and co-author Kathryn Dlugos, M.S. ’17, Ph.D. ’20, assistant professor at Penn State University, analyzed more than 9,000 rejection experiences of employees at a Fortune 100 company over a five-year period.
“A key insight from our work is that employees do not only apply for jobs they want right now; they also apply to learn about what jobs are more or less likely to be available to them in the future,” Keller said. “Even if they are rejected
today, an employee is more likely to stick around when they feel they have a decent shot at advancing to a new job tomorrow.”
Continue reading the original article at Mirage News.
Read the original research in Academy of Management Journal.
Also read this AOM Insights summary citing this research.
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