Partially Directed Search under Behavioral Friction
Standard labor economics assumes search is either fully directed toward top-value vacancies or purely random. In practice, jobseekers actively target higher-value opportunities but miss numerous high-return vacancies because initiating applications requires non-trivial cognitive effort.
Picture this
Think of shopping at a large supermarket with quality items scattered across many aisles. A shopper prefers organic produce and selects it when spotted, but walking down every aisle takes physical effort, so they leave many top-tier items on the shelves. Lowering the effort needed to fetch items allows shoppers to acquire more top-quality goods rather than selecting random products.
What the evidence says
Jobseekers apply to higher-salary jobs at higher rates, but control jobseekers apply to under 0.1% of top-salary quintile matches. Marginal applications induced by phone call initiation match the distribution of inframarginal applications across salary quintiles (p = 0.739), whereas forcing random search via vacancy ordering yields sharply lower interview returns (2.4% vs 6.3%, p = 0.077).
- Who
- N = 1,116,952 jobseeker-vacancy matches across 1,343 vacancies in Lahore, Pakistan.
- How
- Field experiment comparing treatment vs control application distributions across salary and match quality quintiles, contrasted with a randomized vacancy listing order experiment (N = 938,284 matches).
What to do
Deploy search and matching platform algorithms that surface high-value matches while simultaneously eliminating step-initiation barriers for those targeted matches.
From the source
"Control group jobseekers miss many high-value matches... but the share of total applications sent to each quintile does not differ between treatment and control groups."
Why_Don’t_Jobseekers_Search_More_Barriers_and_Returns_to_Search.pdf