Human-Centered Evaluation of Digital Recruitment Platforms: Effects of Interface Quality, User Experience, and Perceived Digital Visibility on Job Seekers' Intention to Apply

As digital transformation accelerates, digital recruitment platforms have become critical human-system interfaces in talent acquisition. However, users’ evaluations may depend partly on human factors, underscoring the need to better account for the people who use them. Online job postings are increasingly common, but exposure to recruitment information does not always translate into application intentions, highlighting the need to better understand how digital recruitment platforms influence applicant responses. Previous e-recruitment studies primarily focused on process efficiency and employer branding. In contrast, fewer studies consider career pages from a human factors perspective, particularly regarding the combined roles of user experience and perceived digital visibility. Therefore, this study investigates the association between interface quality and intention to apply, with user experience and perceived digital visibility as mediating variables. A quantitative cross-sectional survey was conducted among 441 Indonesian job seekers. Data were analysed using PLS-SEM with bootstrapping for measurement and structural models. The results supported all proposed hypotheses, with interface quality showing the strongest relationships with user experience (β = 0.584) and perceived digital visibility (β = 0.576). Moreover, interface quality has a small effect on intention to apply, directly and indirectly through the mediating effect of user experience and perceived digital visibility. The results indicate that in designing recruitment platforms, cognitive clarity, information findability, and user-centeredness should be considered, in addition to technical functionality. This study extends the Stimulus-Organism-Response (SOR) framework and provides insights into SDG 8 by highlighting the role of human-centred digital recruitment platforms in improving access to employment information