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This study examines the effect of hiring managers' demographic characteristics on employee selection preferences, and the strength of the manager's selection preferences towards candidates' demographic characteristics when the candidate's relative qualification changes. A sample of 156 respondents from various industries in Malaysia was acquired and analysed using cross‐tabulation, Chi‐square and t‐test of differences in means. Six variables examined were age, gender, race, religion, marital status, and locality of education. The effect of hiring managers' demographic characteristics on the decision to hire a candidate is significant for two variables: race and religion. Also, the strength of preference, based on the candidate's race and religion, remains high even though their qualification was lower. Implications of the study are discussed.

The aim of this research is to attempt to reveal the difference between what fresh graduates expect and their actual experiences pertaining to the working environment.

Using a set of self‐administered questionnaires, data were collected from 128 graduates. They were asked to indicate their preferences on organizational culture, leadership, communication, decision making, team working, motivation, and development. Using the same dimensions, the respondents then reported their actual experiences, thus enabling gaps to be determined.

The results from paired‐sample t‐tests suggest that significant expectation gaps exist in all the areas surveyed. While communication, decision making and motivation are found to be significantly related to job satisfaction, none of the seven variables is found to be significantly correlated to organizational commitment.

The study focuses only on a rather limited sample size of Malaysian graduates; therefore it cannot ensure generalization of results obtained.

The resulting expectation gaps, and their influence on the graduates' job satisfaction and organizational commitment, have implications for the important roles played by employers, higher learning institutions, and graduate themselves.

This study makes significant contributions in three key areas. First, it is perhaps one of the earliest studies to comprehensively address the issue of expectation gaps using a myriad factors. Second, it is also one of the few that examines the influence of the expectation gaps on job satisfaction and commitment. Third, instead of focusing on employees as a whole, which has been the practice of prior research, this study concentrates only on fresh graduates who have been in the workforce for less than two years.