Differences between Morocco and Spain in the media that organziations use for personnel recruitment and the media that employment seekers use to find a job

This paper reports on an explorative investigation into the differences between Morocco and Spain in the types of communication media that organizations use for personnel recruitment and that employment seekers use to find a job. Based on the Information Richness Theory of Daft and Lengel (1984), the Context Theory of Hall (1976), and the value, uncertainty avoidance, of Hofstede (2001), it is expected that the Moroccans use media with higher information richness than the Spanish. To gain insight into the communication media that Moroccan and Spanish organizations use for personnel recruitment, interviews with comparable organizations in Morocco and Spain were held. Moroccan organizations do indeed more frequently use media high in richness such as professional societies, and Spanish organizations more often use media with a lower level of information richness such as newspapers. To gain insight into the communication media employment seekers use to find employment, experiments were performed among 100 Moroccan and 95 Spanish respondents. The results did not corroborate the expectations. Although there were many differences between the countries in media job seekers use to find a job, these differences were not related to context and uncertainty avoidance. Organizations should recognize that employment seekers from cultures other than their own might tend to use different types of communication media to find a job than employment seekers from their own culture do. Employment seekers, in turn, should realize that organizations from other cultures might use a number of other types of communication media to advertise their vacancies.