Reducing racial gaps in referrals and hiring: two experiments with the Colombian Public Employment Services

This project has two interventions.

First, after collecting information about the implicit bias of firms’ human resource personnel we will provide feedback on the result of their own implicit bias. To estimate the causal effect of this information we will allocate firms randomly into two groups. Group 1 will receive an email with the IAT feedback a few weeks after taking the IAT. Group 2 will receive the same feedback approximately 6 months after taking the IAT.

The second intervention uses information about firms’ behavior to change job counselors' referral of Afro-descendants. The hypothesis is that job counselors may underestimate how impactful they can be in reducing the racial gap in employment. This behavior may come from two sources. First, counselors may underestimate the probability that a referred Afro-descendant because they overestimate firms’ biases. Second, they may underestimate their own importance in the job search process. We call the first channel the mismatch channel, and the second the task significance channel. Hence, we will provide information about how important job counselors are in increasing the chances of Afro-descendant employability. Our message has 3 parts.

1. Afro-descendants get less referrals than non-Afro-descendants.
2. Afro-descendants are more likely to find a job if they are referred than when they apply for a job by themselves.
3. Firms declare that they are more likely to interview an Afro-descendant than job counselors believe.

We use information from the SPE and the entry surveys (both to counselors and firms) to support the three statements.

Regardless of the information we provide, once again we divide job counselors into two groups. Group 1 will receive this information a few weeks after we finish data collection. Group 2 will receive the information approximately 4 months later.

2024-11-01

2024-11-10

The main outcome of the first intervention is the probability of hiring an afro-descendant job seeker. For the second intervention, the focus is the probability of referring an afro-descendant job seeker to a job post.

This information comes from the data sets of all job openings and all job seekers who interact through the SPE. We will use one year of information including 6 months before data collection, and 4 months after the interventions. For each job post, we observe its characteristics and the job seekers that are referred or apply to the post using the SPE. We also observe the CVs that are hired for each job post. For each CV, we observe demographic characteristics including belonging to an ethnic minority, which includes afro-descendants.

The first part of this project is a description of different indicators of bias against afro-descendant job seekers. We will measure de facto (differential probability of referring or hiring an afro-descendant compared with the probability of a non-afro-descendant), explicit (using direct questions and a list experiment), and implicit (using an implicit association test) biases of firms’ HR personnel and job counselors. In addition, we will document the correlations among these indicators. This analysis will use information from the interviews with firms and job counselors, in combination with SEP applications before the interventions.

These estimations use pre-intervention data.
We aim to use data on de facto, implicit, and explicit bias to evaluate possible heterogeneity in the impacts of our intervention.
We will also use ML tools to analyze the heterogeneity of our results with respect to firm, vacant, job center, job counselor, and job seeker characteristics.

We will randomize by intervention.

Intervention 1 - information to firms' personnel about their own IAT results.
Randomization is at the firm level in two groups. We will stratify randomization by size (less than 50 workers, more than 50 workers), sector (commerce, manufacturing, agriculture, and services), region, age (less than 3 years, 3 years or more), and the IAT score (with one respondent with a score lower than 0.35, with no respondent with an IAT score below 0.35).

Treated: They will receive the IAT results a few weeks after completing baseline data collection.
Control: They will receive the IAT results about four (4) months after completing baseline data collection.


Intervention 2 - Information to job counselors about the importance of referrals to increase the employability of afro-descendant job seekers.
Randomization is at the job center level in two groups. We will stratify by region, size in terms of how many job counselors work in the job center, size with respect to how many CVs they manage in a given month, and their IAT score (at least one counselor with an IAT lower than 0.35, no counselor with IAT score lower than 0.35).

Treated: They will receive information about firms a few weeks after completing baseline data collection.
Control: They will receive information about firms about four (4) months after completing baseline data collection.

Not available

By computer

The first intervention will be randomized at the firm level.
The second intervention will be randomized the employment center level.

Yes

First intervention: 788 firms (respondents to the entry survey)
Second intervention: 122 job centers

First intervention: 867 individuals in 788 firms (respondents to the entry survey) Second intervention: 460 job counselors in 122 job centers

Intervention 1: We expect 385 firms by arm.
Intervention 2: We expect 61 job centers by arm.

We will check that job centers in Intervention 2 are balanced within the Intervention 1 group to examine heterogeneity in the impact of Intervention 1 with respect to the information given in Intervention 2.

First intervention: We calculated the MDE for an estimation of the probability that an Afro-descendant job seeker is hired at least once using the SPE data. With matched the respondent firms with the SPE data for a total of 701 firms in the sample. Then, for these firms, the probability that an Afro-descendant is hired is 10.5%, and the MDE is 8 percentage points. For the probability of being hired after referral, the average 19.5% and the MDE is 12 percentage points. Second intervention: We calculated the MDE for an estimation of the probability that an Afro-descendant job seeker is referred at least once using the SPE data. With matched the respondent job centers with the SPE data for a total of 102 job centers in the sample. Using this sample, the probability that an Afro-descendant is referred to at least one job is 48.5 and the MDE is 2 percentage points.