Today’s organizations increasingly adopt demanding hiring process with the aim of getting the best candidates. Drawing upon the signaling theory and equity theory, we posit that (a) demanding hiring process is positively related to initial role expectation, (b) it interacts with job characteristics (job autonomy and complexity) to predict the subsequent trend of role expectation, and (c) initial and the subsequent trend of role expectation have opposite effects on job satisfaction and turnover intention. Unlike conventional wisdom, we caution that demanding hiring process may backfire.
