Similarity attracts: An analysis of recruitment decisions in academia

Abstract

The finding and the recruiting of scientists have been a long-standing issue in higher education. Due to the dearth of reliable evidence on scholarly potential at an early stage of a scientist's career, the hiring department often has to look for alternative assessment criteria. Drawing on the similarity-attraction theory, it is hypothesized that decision makers in academia tend to prefer candidates whose demographic backgrounds are similar to their own. By examining personnel exchange between German departments of business administration, recruitment patterns are visualized and examined on the basis of the similarity-attraction paradigm. Poisson regression analysis indicates that similarity and geographical proximity help to explain recruitment processes among German departments of business administration. © The Author(s) 2010.