Applicant attraction in AI recruitment: The roles of warmth and competence

Organizations increasingly rely on AI recruitment because it enhances efficiency and signals innovation. However, actual applicant reactions to AI recruitment remain poorly understood. We hypothesize that applicant perceptions of an organization’s warmth and competence mediate the effect of AI recruitment on applicant attraction and that applicant technophilia moderates these indirect effects. With five experimental studies (cumulative N = 2,156 participants), we found consistent support for the warmth pathway but not the competence one. The results evidenced a predominantly negative view of AI recruitment among applicants. Higher technophilia tempered the indirect negative effect of AI recruitment on applicant attraction. These findings call for an extension of human-based recruitment theories, which have thus far failed to adequately address the AI recruitment phenomenon. We show that, as AI usage diffuses, warmth considerations will dominate over competence ones and may lead applicants to eschew organizations when AI recruitment is used. Organizations must recognize that using AI recruitment may be interpreted negatively by applicants, especially by non-technophilic one, and should take action to prevent it from diluting applicant attraction.