Recruiters’ Perceptions of Information Systems Graduates with Traditional and Online Education

Online education is on the rise as the number of online courses and degrees has increased significantly in recent years. This trend will continue as many institutions incorporate online studies as part of redesigning and making changes to their curricula. As a result, an increasing number of graduates with a significant part of their education completed online will start to appear in the job market. However, it remains unclear how these graduates are regarded within the job market, compared to their counterparts with strictly traditional studies. To investigate this issue, we presented a set of vignettes describing hypothetical Information Systems (IS) graduates to 82 IS professionals with recruitment experience to ascertain whether an IS graduate's education mode (online versus traditional studies) influence their employment judgments. The findings did not support the notion that an IS graduate's education mode was an important consideration to recruiters. In contrast, other factors included in the vignettes, such as work experience and academic performance were more salient to recruiters. Overall, our findings agree with the viewpoint that online education is evolving into a viable alternative to traditional education, with 'other factors' dominating perceptions of IS graduate attractiveness.