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The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL), Employment and Training Administration (ETA), Office of Workforce Investment (OWI) supports state and local workforce agencies in providing information to help job seekers successfully search for work. As part of this support, OWI asked the DOL Chief Evaluation Office (CEO) and the DOL Behavioral Interventions (DOL BI) team to explore whether applications of behavioral science could improve the usefulness of the information that job seekers use when searching for positions, investing in training, and considering career options. Because of the central role that workforce agencies play in matching job seekers to open positions, CEO and the DOL BI team partnered with West Michigan Works! (WMW), a workforce agency in Michigan, to explore whether behaviorally informed job postings can improve job search success.

By the time the study launched, however, the local labor market was strong. Contrary to researchers’ hypothesis, online job seekers clicked fewer job listings when they were provided with supplemental, behaviorally-informed information added to each listing, intended to show the transferability of skills and experience to different jobs and industries. This key finding indicates that the additional information provided narrowed job seekers’ searches, perhaps due to increased job search efficiency (they found what they needed right away) or decreased job finding rates (for example, due to information overload). It suggests practitioners and researchers working to understand how to improve job search for workers should pay close attention to what information is provided, how it is framed, and how it might interact with behavioral factors.

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Research Questions

• How might applying insights from behavioral science lead people to expand their job search?
• Does providing job seekers with salient information about job postings lead them to engage with a larger number of postings or wider range of industries?
• What were the key features of the context in which this intervention was implemented?
• How did website visitors interact with the new web page? What were their perceptions about benefits and drawbacks of the new design features?

Key Takeaways

Informed by existing evidence, the study team hypothesized that providing a short list of relevant occupations alongside each job listing on a webpage would lead job seekers/website visitors to broaden their search by viewing listings they would have otherwise passed over based on the job title.

• In contrast to researchers’ hypothesis, the study found that this behavioral intervention led website visitors to be 4 percentage points less likely to click on a job listing and to click on an average of 0.1 fewer listings.
• The intervention showed no meaningful impact on the number of industries a website visitor browsed in, nor did it affect their likelihood of making return visits to the site.
• Qualitative results from interviews with five website visitors suggest this small sample of West Michigan Works! customers found the new information helpful in searching efficiently and considering job descriptions they might have overlooked.
• A small sample of four WMW staff felt that the research partnership complemented and supported their organizational culture of continuous improvement.
• This study demonstrates the potential of using web-based experiments to test behavioral interventions that could help job seekers, while the job market was recovering from unemployment spikes due to COVID-19.

Citation

Spitzer, A., Welch, E., Chojnacki, G., Congdon, B., O’Leary, C. (2023). Mathematica. Applying Behavioral Insights to Inform Job Search: Evaluating Effects of a Behaviorally Informed Intervention on Job Search Online in West Michigan. Chief Evaluation Office, U.S. Department of Labor.

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The Department of Labor’s (DOL) Chief Evaluation Office (CEO) sponsors independent evaluations and research, primarily conducted by external, third-party contractors in accordance with the Department of Labor Evaluation Policy and CEO’s research development process.