اثرات بازار کار بر روی انتخاب و استخدام کارفرما

I analyze employer recruitment decisions using a dynamic, discrete-choice structural model that I estimate on a sample of clerical workers from the MCSUI, a large cross section of establishments in four metropolitan areas of the US. In the model, employers choose either informal recruitment methods (which generate a small but select applicant pool from which the employer can hire quickly) or formal methods (which create a large but less select applicant pool which the employer must screen intensively, delaying hiring times). I study the effects of three counterfactual simulations on recruitment strategies, starting wages, and vacancy durations: A wage subsidy, a policy designed to improve information about prospective matches, and an increase in the heterogeneity of prospective matches. I show that the effects of exogenous policy or environmental changes can be decomposed into “pure wage effects” that affect the wage offers employers post, holding constant their recruitment strategies, and “recruitment-wage effects” that involve changes in recruitment methods. The results show that changes in recruitment strategies represent an important channel through which changes in the economic environment affect the starting wages and vacancy duration for new hires.

Employers and job seekers are brought together for potential matches through recruitment and job search activities that help both parties acquire information about the other. The better the information they obtain prior to entering an employment relationship the higher the likelihood of a good match. The crucial role of information in the labor market has been recognized since Stigler (1962), but despite a voluminous literature on job matching and organizational behavior in labor markets, we know far less about employers’ recruitment strategies than about job seekers’ search strategies. As Granovetter (1995, p. 155) notes, “while people are finding jobs, employers are finding people to fill them, and their behaviors, strategies, and purposes play a central but often neglected role in the process of matching people to jobs”. A dearth of good data describing recruitment decisions likely explains the imbalance in research effort. In this paper I analyze employer recruitment strategies using a unique dataset, the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality (MCSUI), a cross-sectional telephone survey of 3510 establishments in LA, Boston, Detroit and Atlanta, conducted during 1992–1995. Employers in the survey were asked questions about the most recently hired worker, including how long it took to hire this worker, the recruitment methods that were used and the one that generated the hire, the worker's starting wage, and the screening methods typically used for hiring workers into that job.1

As the sole means of generating a pool of job applicants, the choice of recruitment strategy is an important problem an employer faces in the process of hiring a new worker. Nevertheless, recruitment behavior is a relatively neglected area of research in labor economics. A complete understanding of the effects of policy and environmental changes affecting hiring processes requires a theoretical framework predicting how employers will respond by adjusting their recruitment strategies. This paper is the first to estimate a dynamic structural model in which recruitment choice is endogenous, exploiting a large cross-sectional establishment-level data set, the MCSUI. By providing a framework for analyzing how recruitment behavior affects labor market outcomes, I have aimed to partially bridge the gap in our knowledge of an area of obvious interest to economists, policymakers, and employers, and to contribute to a deeper understanding of the effect of information and employer behavior on the job matching process. Furthermore, as seen in Table 8, the structural model successfully predicts two of the basic empirical observations from Section 2, namely that secretaries hired via informal methods are hired faster and at lower starting wages than those hired via formal methods. The observation that secretaries hired via informal methods start at a lower wage than those hired via formal methods might seem counterintuitive, given the conventional wisdom that informal methods yield better matches on average, but this result is easily understood in light of the structural model.