RAPPORT
WWW.RECORDINGACHIEVEMENT.AC.UK
Issue 2 (2015)
on the third type, which is also known as the
Career Portfolio. The Career Portfolio has
previously been operationalised as “organised
evidence of work readiness and specific job skills
[which] can be focused to show the skills that
employers want” (Smith, 1996). Woodbury et al.
(2009) adds that the Career Portfolio consists of a
resumé, in addition to evidence of abilities,
knowledge, skills, and potential to build credibility.
As such, the Career Portfolio can be considered a
digital CV including evidence for implicit claims
regarding an individual’s work readiness. The
Career Portfolio could reduce the information
asymmetry between jobseekers and companies
by providing the two groups of information as
identified by Autor (2001) in a standardized and
transparent manner.
Career Portfolio challenges
One major challenge surrounding the Career
Portfolio is information overload due to a lack of
focus; Career Portfolio readers can become
overwhelmed
by
excessive,
disorganized
information (Lorenzo & Ittelson, 2005). As a result,
the tool is still predominantly used in isolation in
certain contexts, mostly within education. Mosely
(2004) and Boyle (2011) further substantiate this
by identifying two main reasons for non-use of
Career Portfolios: the lack of time and the
unstructured nature of Career Portfolios. An
important recommendation from a study by
Whitworth, Deering, Hardy and Jones (2011) was
that applicants should reduce the amount of time
it takes to view Career Portfolios. This could be
done by being more selective in the items included
to reduce the size of the Career Portfolio and
make items more focused. This is in line with the
finding that recruiters believe that Career
Portfolios provide prospective employees with an
opportunity to showcase their competences
(Boody, 2009).
In an attempt to make Career Portfolios more
suitable for recruitment purposes, efforts have
been made to standardize ePortfolios to make the
contents interpretable and exchangeable among
different parties. Examples of standards include
the international IMS ePortfolio standard, which
saw derivatives being developed in the United
Kingdom (Leap2A specification) and the
Netherlands (NEN ePortfolio specification). In
spite of these efforts, this has not yet materialized
in Career Portfolio uptake for jobseeking
purposes. While the standard provides insight into
the types of information that could be incorporated
into a Career Portfolio, it emphasizes an
exchange of information from a technical point of
view and as such does not include a list of specific
Career Portfolio constituents for jobseeking
purposes. The needs and perspectives of job
seekers and employers regarding Career Portfolio
constituents are rarely addressed in the Career
Portfolio literature.
Therefore, our research
question reads: “which information is relevant to
the recruitment process, according to job seekers
and recruiters”? In accordance with Autor’s
division of objectively verifiable and hard to verify
data, we hypothesize that students and recruiters
are in agreement on the inclusion of elements
representing both types.
Method
Participants:
Two samples, one student and one recruiter
sample, participated in this study for the
identification of the relevant constituents of a
Career Portfolio profile. A total of 158 respondents
(63 students and 95 recruiters) voluntarily
participated in our study. The mean age of the
students was 21.14 years (SD = 2.44 years),
58.7% were women, all attended university
education. Recruiters were enrolled during a HR
conference. The mean age of the recruiters was
41.91 years (SD = 8.74 years), 58.9% were
women. Most of the recruiters worked in the profit
sector (80.0%; non-profit sector 20.0%).
Procedure
At a moment of their convenience, participants
filled in an online questionnaire, based on the
items found in Table 1.
Measures
Relevant information for recruitment. Following
Autor’s (2001) distinction between two types of
information (high and low bandwidth data), we
constructed a scale of 10 items (5 items for both
information types), with each item representing
potentially relevant recruitment information.
Examples of items include: “Description of
education” (easily verifiable), and “Professional
goals and aspirations” (hard to verify; see left side
Table 1). Students were asked whether they
would like to include the item in a job application
and recruiters were asked whether they would like
to review the item in the selection process. Items
were rated on a five-point scale, ranging from 1
(completely disagree) to 5 (completely agree).
These scores were also transformed into a
dichotomized variable using a cut-off score of 3 to
create two groups of items, specifically those
which should be included in a job application
(Mean>3), and those which should not be included
(Mean<3).
Results
Table 1 provides the means and standard
deviations of the rated recruitment in f