Extended Data Fig. 7: Effect of a click on the contact button on the likelihood of leaving unemployment.
From: Monitoring hiring discrimination through online recruitment platforms
Effect and associated cluster-robust 95% confidence intervals of a click on the contact button on Job-Room on the likelihood that a jobseeker leaves unemployment, exploiting that we can link candidates to the unemployment register. The dependent variables are dummy variables equal to one if a jobseeker leaves unemployment within 30, 60, 90, 120 and 150 days, respectively, after a search. Each coefficient is derived from a separate regression (n = 12,823,811 profiles). The variable of interest is the contact attempt on Job-Room. The sample consists of all individuals that appeared within a result list of a search between March and September 2017. We drop the remaining periods because we observe unemployment exits only up to March 2018. We also exclude all registered unemployed individuals who reach their maximum benefit duration to make sure that exit out of unemployment represents a voluntary decision by the jobseeker. The regressions control for search-specific fixed effects and all variables visible to recruiters on Job-Room including unemployment duration at the time of the search and all relevant first-order interactions. The model contains 2,569 covariates that are predictive for leaving unemployment and the contact button click, selected by the Lasso-based post-double selection method. The regressions thus control for all factors that plausibly influence recruiters’ contact attempts on the platform. The coefficients are identified because certain individuals are contacted on the platform whereas observationally equivalent individuals who appear in the same search are not; for example, because of idiosyncrasies in recruiters’ decisions or because their candidate profile is not visited (for example, as they are ranked low in the result list). The average likelihood of leaving unemployment after 30 (60, 90, 120, 150) days is 17% (30%, 40%, 48%, 54%). The click on the contact button thus increases the likelihood to leave unemployment within 90 days after the search by 2.1% (0.821/40). Standard errors are clustered at recruiter level.
