Do as your parents say?—Analyzing IT adoption influencing factors for full and under age applicants Sven Laumer & Andreas Eckhardt & Natascha Trunk Published online: 5 August 2008 # Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2008 Abstract The article suggests a model for examining the adoption of e-recruiting by individuals. The model is empirically evaluated using survey data from 323 full and under age applicants. The results explain substantial parts of the individual adoption decision. Interestingly, the relative importance of the adoption drivers varies with age, social environment and the level of education. While, as expected, overall Performance Expectancy is the major force behind adopting e-recruiting, the relative importance of the other factors differs a lot. Whereas Facilitating Conditions came out as an important driver for under age pupils, full age students by contrast are highly driven by the influence of their peer groups and the communication of the respective company they apply for. A major outcome is that the Subjective Norm of family and friends, teachers and professors has a weaker influence for under age pupils who mostly live with their parents than for the group of students who already left home to study at college. Consequentially we assume that the social influence of peer groups on an individual’ s adoption differs with respect to age, social environment and level of education. This should be investigated more carefully in future adoption research as it might provide an answer for the varying significance of Subjective Norm in adoption research. Keywords IS adoption/diffusion . Household . E-recruiting . Subjective norm . Partial least squares 1 Introduction Do you use electronic or paper based applications when applying for a job? E-recruiting has become the mainstream way for both firms and applicants to interact on the labor market. For some years now, the majority of vacancies in larger firms across all industries is posted on the Internet (see Keim et al. 2005 for an e-recruiting diffusion curve), most hires result from online channels, and many applicants have switched to using electronic application channels (Keim et al. 2005; Keim and Weitzel 2006). Nevertheless, even despite firms increasingly asking applicants to use electronic channels to respond to—mostly electronic—job ads, it is not entirely clear why some applicants use e- recruiting and others do not. This is interesting for at least two reasons. First, firms seek substantial cost and quality improvements by seeking Information Systems (IS) support for their HR process, which requires digital workflows and content. In this context, Lee (2007) suggests an architecture for IS support for recruiting processes, and Keim et al. (2005) depict a possible HR/IS diffusion pattern. From the applicants’ perspective, electronic applications are interest- ing as they enable firms to find interesting profiles despite the possibly tens of thousands of CVs a firm might receive each year; this is also shown in a trend towards passive applications when applicants leave their CVs in a database as provided by large Internet job boards (e.g. Monster) or Inf Syst Front (2010) 12:169–183 DOI 10.1007/s10796-008-9136-x S. Laumer (*) : N. Trunk Centre of Human Resources Information Systems, Otto-Friedrich-University Bamberg, Feldkirchenstraße 21, 96045 Bamberg, Germany e-mail: laumer@is-bamberg.de N. Trunk e-mail: trunk@is-bamberg.de A. Eckhardt Centre of Human Resources Information Systems, Goethe University Frankfurt a. Main, Mertonstraße 17, 60325 Frankfurt, Germany e-mail: eckhardt@is-frankfurt.de