Applicant reactions are applicants’ perceptions, attitudes, emotions, intentions, and behaviors arising from the selection process. The field examines how applicants experience interviews, assessments, explanations, rejection, digital selection procedures, and organizational representatives—not only whether a selection procedure predicts performance.

William’s thesis extends this tradition by identifying organizational identification as a mediator connecting interpersonal treatment with recommendation intentions.

Organizational justice concerns perceived fairness in organizational decisions, procedures, and interpersonal treatment. Applicants evaluate both the selection decision and how the organization reached and communicated it.

Interpersonal treatment was the only justice-related dimension in the thesis that uniquely predicted organizational identification. Procedural justice may be necessary without being sufficient to establish pre-entry identification.

Group-value theory argues that fair treatment matters partly because it communicates whether an applicant is respected, trusted, and included as a prospective member of a valued group. Organizational justice therefore conveys identity-relevant information beyond the selection outcome.

An applicant may interpret respect and sincerity as evidence of future membership: ‘Is this how applicants like me are treated here?’ This supplies the theoretical bridge from interpersonal treatment to organizational identification.

Organizational identification is a perceived sense of oneness with an organization and the experience of its successes and failures as one’s own. It is identity-based—not simply satisfaction, attraction, commitment, or an intention to stay.

William positions organizational identification as the mechanism that converts interpersonal treatment into recommendation intentions—an early stage of the psychological employment relationship.