Recruiting‐related online innovations represent growing and high‐potential opportunities for employers to broaden the reach of their recruiting efforts as well as reduce costs. The diffusion of innovative approaches for online recruiting, however, may experience bias due to potential employees’ lack of trust in firms offering positions online, particularly when the firms are small, operate in a risky industry, or are relatively unknown. We use the theory of reasoned action to propose that users of a corporate website develop trust beliefs with regard to three characteristics of the firm: ability, integrity, and benevolence. We have proposed three hypotheses highlighting the importance of trust generated by the corporate website in potential employees. Our experimental results involved a sample of 218 potential employees. These subjects were offered a consulting position in a fictional firm, which could only be known through its corporate website. Although previous literature has paid marginal attention to the influence of users’ beliefs regarding corporate integrity and benevolence, our findings showed that users’ perceptions of the corporate website regarding firm integrity and benevolence increased the users’ willingness to accept a job at the firm. We propose implications of our results for practitioners and for the literature of trust in online contexts.
