U. of Minnesota Carlson School of Management, United States
Resource attraction is a critical challenge facing entrepreneurial ventures, and human capital represents an especially important resource. In this paper, we explore how technically-trained job seekers evaluate startups' employment opportunities. We identify role ambiguity as a salient feature of job evaluation and hypothesize that tech-trained job seekers will be less attracted to jobs featuring higher levels of expected role ambiguity. We further propose that this effect will be stronger for startups than for established firms. We test these hypotheses using an online experiment in the context of the online labor market. In our main study – Study 1 – we rely on a pre-registered online framed-field experiment and test the influence of expected role ambiguity on organizational attractiveness for tech-trained job seekers. We conduct two more studies for validation. In Study 2, we ensure that our results are specific to individuals with technical training. In Study 3, we assess the external validity of our findings using a manually-collected dataset of 5,380 job ads from LinkedIn. Our results contribute to the entrepreneurship and strategic human capital literatures by shedding light on the nuanced challenges startups face in online labor markets.
