Understanding the Implications of Job Location Arrangements on the Job Application Process

In this project, we study whether candidates for a real job behave differently when they are informed that the position will be remote.

2023-07-01

2024-07-01

We collect the following primary outcomes:
- Proportion who starts the application: This is defined as the number of candidates who start the application/ The number who are invited to apply. A candidate is considered to have been invited to apply if they are sent an email with details on the specific position and a link to the application.
-Proportion who complete: This is defined as the number who complete the application/ The number who are invited to apply. A candidate is considered to have been invited to apply if they are sent an email with details on the specific position and a link to the application. A candidate is said to have completed if they answer all questions and clicked submit.

Below we outline how we will use our primary outcomes and the key hypothesis.
To understand whether work location arrangements the behaviour of candidates we study the proportion that complete and the proportion who start the assessment when informed the work location is in-office vs. work from home. We generate the following hypothesis:
Hypothesis 1: Application/Completion rates are higher in the treatment where candidates are informed they will be working from home compared to not being informed.
Hypothesis 2: Females/ male ratio in application rates are higher in the work from home treatment compared to the in-office treatment.

To understand possible mechanisms we elicit the following secondary outcome variables:
Time to complete the questions: the candidates completion time is recorded.
Diversity Analysis:
We will also use a number of variables to understand the influence of work location arrangements on candidate diversity. Our main focus will be on gender but as a secondary analysis conditional on obtaining sufficient observations we also study ethnicity. To focus on diversity, we will interact the treatment variables by the gender and possibly ethnicity (separately) of the candidate.
Heterogeneity Analysis:
We will also consider the impact of work location arrangements on the quality of candidates. As such, we will measure how observable characteristics such as education and work experience of completed applications varies with the treatment and gender/ethnicity of the applicants.
We also conduct a number of robustness tests
-As a robustness to completion and application rates, we also track the proportion of people who open the email.

See above

Our design aims to measure the impact of work location arrangements (i.e. in-office vs. working from home) on behavior of job candidates.

Not available

Randomization will be carried out by a computer.

The randomization unit will be the individual for all treatments.

No

The clusters will be equal to the number of legitimate candidates. Based on previous experience we expect to have 1200 legitimate job applicants, but this will likely vary depending on a number of factors. A legitimate candidate is someone who resides in the United States and completes the initial application form. We plan to assign 50% of the sample to the in-office treatment and 50% to the work from home treatment. Further, we will stratify by gender such that there is the same proportion of men/women in each treatment.

The number of observations is the same as the number of clusters. We hope to have up to 1200 observations.

See above. We plan to assign 50% of the sample to the in-office treatment and 50% to the work from home treatment. Further, we will stratify by gender such that there is the same proportion of men/women in each treatment.

The MDE for the following outcomes are: Proportion who complete and start: Using a significance of 0.05, power of 0.8 and a value of 0.6 as the proportion who complete/start for in-person positions we can detect a minimum effect size of 0.079.