Recruiting mid-qualified workers in product-innovating firms: Which personality traits matter?

Change in the work context is an important characteristic of product-innovating firms, and the innovation's profitability often depends on the workers’ adaptive capability to cope with change. Personality traits shape the individual adaptive capability. Nevertheless, the current economic recruitment literature does not discuss personality trait-oriented recruitment in product-innovating firms. We investigate whether recruiters in product-innovating firms prefer mid-qualified job applicants with certain Big Five personality traits. We conduct a discrete choice experiment among 799 firms in Germany and use mixed logit models to estimate the heterogeneous personality preferences of recruiters by distinguishing between firms performing i) radical and ii) incremental product innovations. We find that recruiters prefer more emotionally stable workers regardless of the firm's innovation type. However, recruiters from firms engaging in radical innovations also prefer more conscientious applicants. Our findings have practical implications for firms, applicants and policy makers designing training curricula, because we show that recruiters from product-innovating firms consider personality trait-oriented recruitment not only for high-qualified workers but also for mid-qualified workers.