Employers' hiring behaviors in a developing country - input for enhancing the quality of higher education

The enhancement of the quality of the education is conditioned by getting continuous feedback from the stakeholders. Both employers' satisfaction and graduates' outcomes when entering the labor market represent indicators for the quality of higher education system. Due to its complexity, the graduates' employment requires an analysis of the interaction between the external factors (educational system and labor market characteristics) and internal mechanisms that guide the decisional process of the actors involved.. Bringing a micro level approach, the present research focuses on the Romanian employers' understanding of the value of graduates' degree and education quality in job assignment process. Following the "sorting theory" approach and the methodological insights of employers' surveys, this paper tries to determine how employers value and use credentials in the job selection process. A questionnaire based survey was conducted on 120 Romanian companies. The results show that the job selection process undergoes two stages: a screening phase (where the educational degree plays a crucial role because the employer evaluates the degree attainment, educational specialization, level of degree, reputation of the institution) and the hiring stage (where the educational results play a less important role, being outbalanced by general competencies). By ignoring the signaling value of the educational degree there is a cost increase at the level of the selection process. Employers waste resources during the matching process of graduates to suitable jobs by not using the information offered by the educational credentials.