2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This paper explores how companies present themselves to prospective employees at a campus-wide job fair at Purdue University, a large, public research university predominantly serving engineering and other STEM fields. Company overview statements and industry affiliations were collected for the 413 registered organizations, of which 347 were used in the analysis for this paper. The goal is to investigate the language used by companies and how that may influence someone during their job search. A content analysis was conducted followed by a hybrid inductive/deductive thematic analysis focusing on five themes of factors proposed to influence job-choice decisions (i.e., internal, external, interpersonal, institutional, socio-demographic) as well as specific social responsibility themes. The findings indicate that companies mostly emphasized institutional factors in their overview statements, followed by internal and external factors. However, almost 26% of companies noted social responsibility themes such as sustainability efforts and protecting the environment. Future work could explore how first-time job seekers prioritize the factors and themes during their job-choice decision process. This work intends to inform engineering students, educators, and administrators during the students’ development and job choice process, university career center administrators guiding students through the job search process, company recruiters in their interview and selection process during the student’s job search, and industry partners in the recruitment, hiring, and retention of engineering graduates with similar values. The following sections will detail the literature associated with influences on students’ job choice decisions, especially engineering students, the methods used to collect and analyze the data, the findings, and a discussion of the implications.