How does the perceived difficulty of the employment interview influence offer acceptance rates before and after mass layoff?

Burlacu, Teodora (2025) How does the perceived difficulty of the employment interview influence offer acceptance rates before and after mass layoff? Master thesis, Psychology.

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Abstract

While finding the suitable candidate is an essential part of the recruitment process, that process yields no return if the candidate decides to not accept the job offer. This makes it essential to examine what drives offer acceptance. The understanding of offer acceptance becomes even more complex during periods of mass layoffs, when even less is known about how candidates’ willingness to accept offers may shift. In past literature, candidate perceptions of the interviewing process have been found to influence job offer acceptance. Furthermore, candidate perceptions have been found to shift during periods of mass layoff. This study investigates how perceptions of interview difficulty influences offer acceptance and investigates it in the context of mass layoffs. As such, I expect interviews perceived as easy and moderate to have a positive relationship and perceived hard interviews to have a negative relationship with job offer acceptance. Introducing mass layoffs as a moderator changes all difficulties to have a positive relationship with job offer acceptance. The data stems from web scraping Glassdoor reviews and encompasses five big tech companies before and after a period of mass layoffs. After running a generalized linear mixed model, easy interviews were found to have a significant positive relationship, and hard interviews were found to have a significant negative relationship with offer acceptance. Moderate interviews had no significant relationship with offer acceptance. No moderation effect of mass layoffs was found. This research expands the literature on employment interviews, through the effect of interview difficulty on offer acceptance, and extends the increasingly important literature on mass layoffs. Keywords: interview difficulty, employment interview, career shocks, mass layoffs, motivation

Item Type:	Thesis (Master)
Supervisor name:	Kitz, C.C. and Schmitt, A.
Degree programme:	Psychology
Differentiation route:	Work, Organizational and Personnel Psychology (WOP) [Master Psychology]
Date Deposited:	17 Jul 2025 09:45
Last Modified:	17 Jul 2025 09:45
URI:	http://gmwpublic.studenttheses.ub.rug.nl/id/eprint/5617

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