Implications of Public Sector Hiring Structures on Private Sector Labor Markets

Treatment resumes will belong to candidates with a history of government exam preparation after graduating college. The control group comprises candidates who worked in the private sector after graduating college.

2025-12-15

2026-01-31

Interest in shortlisting the resume (1-10 scale), rating of skills shown in the resume against the job description (1-10 scale), rating of perceived likelihood that the candidate will stay at the firm for at least a year if hired (1-10 scale), and pay conditional on hiring.

The focus of the experiment is on the differential effects of staying unemployed to prepare for government exams relative to working in the private sector after graduation. The study will comprise a large-scale resume experiment conducted as face to face interviews with recruiters in a large staffing firm. Resumes will vary in whether a candidate reveals a history of preparing for government exams. Ratings received by candidates with experience preparing for government exams will be compared to ratings received by candidates who have never prepared for government exams and have worked in the private sector. All other characteristics including gender, religion, school and college quality, academic grades, and extra-curricular activities will be held constant across all resume variants within a job posting.

Effects for all experiments will be estimated through variation in ratings within a job role (the specification will include recruiter by role FEs) and SEs will be clustered at the recruiter by role level.

Each recruiter sees 5 sets of 6 resumes each, with each set showing different roles (randomly
chosen from list above). Each set is chosen from one of four types:

• Core set: This set shows resumes with private sector experience only or government prep experience only, across three ages (22, 23, 24 years old), yielding a total of 6 resumes. This is the main focus of the project, and aims to understand if resumes showing government exam prep face any benefits or penalties relative to resumes showing only private sector experience, and how these effects change with the number of years spent on exam preparation.

• Mixed set: This set shows three experience types: private sector experience only, government prep only, or a mixed type (government prep with simultaneous private sector work experience). This set only shows two age groups (22 or 24 years old), again yielding a total of 6 resumes. The aim here is to understand if supplementing government exam prep with private sector experience can lead to better private sector outcomes if a candidate chooses to transition into the private sector.

• Silent set: This set again shows three types of candidates: private sector experience only, government prep experience only (explicitly stated), or a resume with an unexplained career gap. This set only shows two age groups (22 or 24 years old), again yielding a
total of 6 resumes. The aim here is to understand if an unexplained career gap in a resume fares better or worse than explicitly stating government prep experience.

• Standard set: In this set, recruiters are shown resumes with only private sector experience, across six experience ranges (1, 2, 3, 5, 7, or 10 years of experience). The aim of this set is to understand the returns to private sector experience across different skill domains in India. This set will also be used to receive manager benchmarking ratings and to calculate incentives for the respondents.


Each recruiter sees three core sets, one standard set, and one of the silent or mixed sets
(chosen randomly), giving a total of 5 sets.

Resumes will be generated using code that will randomly assign candidate characteristics (government vs private sector choice after graduation, years since graduation, college score, etc) to each variant. Resumes are generated using the program developed by Lahey and Beasley (2009).

Resume

No

100 recruiters

30 resumes shown to each recruiter (total of 3000 observations)

About half of resumes shown will belong to the treatment group (government exam preparation after graduation) and half will belong to the control group (private sector work experience after graduation)