Information Frictions on Job Descriptions

Authors
Andelyn Russell

For firms to grow and increase productivity, skilled personnel are essential. Yet attracting and retaining personnel is a persistent issue in developing countries. Research indicates that high turnover is partly due to workers’ dissatisfaction with job characteristics, which they only learn upon taking the position. Jobseekers have preferences over standard characteristics, such as salary and location, but also characteristics that are typically “missing” from job descriptions, such as firm size, workplace gender ratios, and informal training opportunities. Firms may be unaware of these preferences or it may be too costly for them to acquire and provide them. This project will investigate what is the effect of preferences over missing job characteristics on job matching in an online job platform in Karnataka, India. 

The research methodology involves a data collection exercise, an incentive-compatible preference elicitation, and an RCT. First, the researchers will recruit hiring managers who have an entry-level, salaried vacancy on the platform. If the hiring manager agrees, they will collect job characteristics from four sources: the job post, the job board’s backend data, a firm survey, and web scraping. These jobs form the “vacancy set”. Second, using the incentive compatible preference elicitation developed in Kessler et al. (2019), the researchers will elicit preferences over job characteristics from a sample of jobseekers on the platform. From the results, they will identify the top 5 most valued “missing” characteristics. Finally, to estimate the effect of including these characteristics on job posts, they will conduct an experiment involving an information intervention on 3,000 jobseekers. Treated jobseekers will be shown the values of the “missing” characteristics of jobs in the vacancy set, and the researchers will measure jobseekers’ decisions to apply.

This project will provide evidence on jobseekers’ preferences and on whether adding “missing” characteristics to job descriptions enables firms to attract more diverse, qualified applicants. This can directly inform government and brand policy over which workplace amenities to mandate, and whether to mandate reporting on job descriptions, as in NYC’s pay transparency law (Liu 2022). The policy relevance of the study extends to gender equality, as it will examine preferences over missing characteristics that may be particularly important to women, such as workplace gender ratios, gender of the manager, threat of sexual harassment, interacting with strangers, and training opportunities.
 

Authors

Andelyn Russell

University of Pennsylvania