Measuring job-hunting maintenance processes of Japanese university students: Scale development

Abstract

The present study aimed to develop a scale to measure job-hunting maintenance processes, that is, the processes by which university students maintain their job-hunting activities after having received rejections from companies that they had applied to; in addition, the reliability and validity of the scale was examined. The participants were undergraduate and graduate students who had finished their job-hunting activities. In Study 1 (N = 212), the scale was developed, and it was demonstrated that the scale had sufficient internal consistency and validity. In Study 2 (TV = 72), relations between job-hunting maintenance processes and the time of the students' job-hunting period were analyzed. The results suggested that the job-seekers' behavior was different, depending on the time of their job-hunting. The new scale successfully predicted the processes. For example, at the beginning of the students' job-hunting (the primary process), the job-seekers tended to engage in present-oriented behavior, in order to maintain their job-hunting activity. As they gradually became more experienced with job-hunting (the secondary process), they tended to engage in future-oriented (goal-oriented) behavior, such as setting attainable goals. These results suggest that the new scale may be effective for differentiating between the primary and secondary processes involved in job-hunting maintenance.