The words a company uses to describe its ideal hire can decide who applies. Job postings that ask for a creative, persuasive, ambitious candidate who “thinks outside the box” appeal more strongly to narcissists, and recruiters lean on exactly that language when a firm might benefit from bending the rules.
The study is by Jonathan Gay of the University of Mississippi, Scott B. Jackson of the University of South Carolina and Nicholas Seybert of the University of Maryland. It was published online in Management Science on September 12, 2024, and appeared in the journal’s May 2025 issue.
Rule-Benders versus Rule-Followers
Earlier research links narcissistic executives to earnings management and other harmful behavior. The authors wanted to know whether firms attract such people at the very first step: the job ad.
Reading real postings for senior accounting jobs, they pulled out six recurring phrases they call “Rule-Bender” terms, including “thinks outside the box,” “develops creative solutions,” “persuasive,” “ambitious and self-reliant” and “results-oriented.” Each got an opposite “Rule-Follower” term, such as “thinks methodically,” “relies on time-tested solutions,” “straightforward” and “process-oriented.”
Searches on Indeed.com showed the Rule-Bender words turn up more in creative industries and sales jobs, and the Rule-Follower words more in compliance roles and nonprofits. In three validation studies, ordinary people saw a Rule-Bender candidate as a worse manager but more likely to behave unethically, including managing earnings.
Narcissists see themselves in the bolder ad
In the first experiment, 248 U.S. college graduates read a job ad describing either a Rule-Bender or a Rule-Follower and completed a standard 16-item narcissism questionnaire. Among those who saw the Rule-Bender ad, people high in narcissism rated the job’s fit with their talents at 81 out of 100, against 69 for those low in narcissism. For the Rule-Follower ad, the two groups barely differed, at about 75 each.
The second experiment moved to real professionals. The team emailed some 17,000 accounting managers at public companies, and 154 completed the study. Shown two Chief Accounting Officer openings at high-tech firms side by side, more narcissistic managers said they were more likely to apply to, and better suited for, the one written in Rule-Bender language.
Recruiters pick the language to match the firm
The last two experiments looked at the people who write the ads. In one, 67 human resource professionals drafted a Chief Accounting Officer posting for either a high-growth, high-innovation firm or a slow, low-innovation one. They favored Rule-Bender terms for the high-growth firm, on most of the six word pairs.
In the other, 57 executive recruiters who specialize in accounting and finance preferred Rule-Bender terms more when a firm’s financial statements would be used by investors to value it, a setting where aggressive reporting benefits the owners, than when owners use the statements to monitor operations.
The authors point out that recruiters say they try to avoid narcissists. But even if every interview after the ad is fair, a posting that pulls more narcissists into the applicant pool raises the odds that one gets hired.
They note limits too: building the candidate descriptions involved considerable researcher judgment, some professional samples were modest, and the experiments were simplified versions of real hiring. Their finding also offers one possible reason why high-growth, high-innovation companies show more earnings management: the job ads they post may attract the people most willing to do it.
Study Details:
- Title: Seductive Language for Narcissists in Job Postings
- Authors: Jonathan Gay, Scott B. Jackson, Nicholas Seybert
- Journal: Management Science, Vol. 71, No. 5, pages 4433-4452
- Publication Date: September 12, 2024 (online); May 2025 issue
- DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.2024.05254