How Online Social Networks Affect My Job Choice Intention : An Empirical Approach

Recent years have witnessed the rapid proliferation of social networking sites, which have gradually changed people’s way to deal with employment and recruitment process. From job seekers’ perspective, their occupational decisions will be consciously or unconsciously affected by information and activities in online social networks. In this study, we focus on job choice intention, which is formed from an impressionable and suggestible state, but has predictive power on the final decision. Since it is a fairly new angle with scant literature, we adopted an exploratory approach and identified two influence mechanisms built upon expectancy theory. We conducted a survey on graduating college students from IT-related majors, and examined how the online social networks serve as information providers and interactive platforms. Our results suggest that online social networks have significant impact on job choice intentions through information seeking behaviors and peer influence