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Vacancies and Recruitment

Paper Session

Saturday, Jan. 5, 2019 8:00 AM - 10:00 AM

Hyatt Regency Atlanta, Grand Hall East A
Hosted By: Labor and Employment Relations Association
  • Chair: Steven J. Davis, University of Chicago

Recruiting Intensity over the Business Cycle

Eliza Forsythe
,
University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign
Russell Weinstein
,
University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign

Abstract

We investigate how recruiting behavior changes with labor market tightness, using data from a national survey of employers who hire recent college graduates. We find that employers are more likely to increase recruiting intensity when they believe the labor market will be tight, even if their firm is not increasing hires. Employers are more likely to reduce recruiting intensity when they believe the labor market will be slack, even if their firm intends to increase hires. We also see these patterns in recruiting intensity, and intensity per vacancy, when looking at changes by year rather than subjective beliefs. We find the primary margins of adjustment are the number of on-campus career fairs, the choice of where to post jobs, internet advertising, starting salary increases, and the use of signing bonuses. We see suggestive evidence that employers adjust the length of time between interviews and making an offer. We find that vacancy yields are relatively stable in the 2011-2016 period, suggesting that employers effectively adjust recruiting measures to keep the flow of hires close to the number of vacancies. The fact that employers appear to adjust recruiting intensity in response to labor market tightness could partly explain the sluggish recovery of hiring in the aftermath of the Great Recession.

Minimum Wage Increases and Vacancies

Marianna Kudlyak
,
Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco
Murat Tasci
,
Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland
Didem Tuzemen
,
Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City

Abstract

We estimate the impact of minimum wage increases on the quantity of labor demanded as measured by firms' vacancy postings. This is in contrast to the existing and highly contentious literature that studies the effect of the minimum wage on employment, which is an equilibrium outcome shaped by a combination of changes in the firms' hiring and firing, quantity of labor demanded and labor supplied, and other factors. We use confidential, county-level vacancy data from the Conference Board's Help Wanted Online Data Series that cover the period from 2004 to 2017. The vacancy counts are available at the 6-digit occupation level, reported separately for total vacancies and new vacancies, allowing us to distinguish between stocks and flows of vacancies. We separately study state-level increases in the minimum wages, as well as minimum wage increases at the sub-state jurisdiction levels. We find that minimum wage increases lead to substantial declines in new vacancy postings. Estimating the impact of minimum wage hikes on vacancy creation for different job categories is under way.

Incentives Can Reduce Bias in Online Reviews

Ioana Elena Marinescu
,
University of Pennsylvania
Nadav Klein
,
University of Chicago
Andrew Chamberlain
,
Glassdoor, Inc.
Morgan Smart
,
Glassdoor, Inc.

Abstract

Online reviews are a powerful means of propagating the reputations of products, services, and even employers. However, existing research suggests that online reviews often suffer from selection bias; people with extreme opinions are more motivated to share them than people with moderate opinions, resulting in biased distributions of reviews. Providing incentives for reviewing has the potential to reduce this selection bias, because incentives can mitigate the motivational deficit of people who hold moderate opinions. Using data from one of the leading employer review companies Glassdoor, we show that voluntary reviews have a different distribution from incentivized reviews. The likely bias in the distribution of voluntary reviews can affect workers' choice of employers, because it changes the ranking of industries by average employee satisfaction. Because observational data from Glassdoor are not able to provide a measure of the true distribution of employer reviews, we complement our investigation with a randomized controlled experiment on MTurk. We find that when participants' decision to review their employer is voluntary, the resulting distribution of reviews differs from the distribution of forced reviews. Moreover, providing relatively high monetary rewards or a pro-social cue as incentives for reviewing reduces this bias. We conclude that while voluntary employer reviews often suffer from selection bias, incentives can significantly reduce bias and help workers make more informed employer choices.
Discussant(s)
Jason Faberman
,
Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago
Isaac Sorkin
,
Stanford University
John Horton
,
New York University
JEL Classifications
  • J2 - Demand and Supply of Labor