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Field
Intervention (Public)
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Before
This study consists of a two-sided field experiment with job applicants and recruiters. In the first stage of the intervention consists of randomizing the educational qualifications stated in job postings for entry-level positions. Each applicant is exposed to one of three versions of the posting:
Degree Required: The job description explicitly requires a bachelor’s degree.
Degree Silent: The job description does not mention educational requirements.
Skill-Based Hiring: The job description explicitly states that the company welcomes candidates who have developed skills through diverse pathways and/or that hiring decisions will be based on skill assessments.
Candidates are recruited through two channels: (a) direct outreach via email campaigns using candidate lists from ZipRecruiter, and (b) organic job board traffic to the firm’s career site. Randomization occurs at the individual candidate level through unique identifiers embedded in email links and randomized landing pages. Once assigned, candidates consistently view the same condition.
The second stage of the field experiment will provide the measure of skill quality used in the first stage to examine how degree requirements shape the applicant pool in terms of skill match. To obtain an exogenous measure, I will remove the confounding effects of (i) the job framing and (ii) applicant-pool composition from recruiters’ assessments of quality by randomizing. These removed effects will capture the equilibrium dynamics of the labor market: how—by shaping who applies—degree requirements will influence how recruiters evaluate those who do, which may further reinforce stratification.
To achieve this, surveyed recruiters will be randomly assigned to one of three conditions:
1.Matched Framing and Applicant Pool.
2. Framing Randomization across Fixed Applicant Pools.
3. Joint Randomization of Framing and Applicant Pool.
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After
This study consists of a two-sided field experiment with job applicants and recruiters. In the first stage of the intervention consists of randomizing the educational qualifications stated in job postings for entry-level positions. Each applicant is exposed to one of three versions of the posting:
Degree Required: The job description explicitly requires a bachelor’s degree.
Degree Silent: The job description does not mention educational requirements.
Skill-Based Hiring: The job description explicitly states that the company welcomes candidates who have developed skills through diverse pathways and/or that hiring decisions will be based on skill assessments.
Candidates are recruited through two channels: (a) direct outreach via email campaigns using candidate lists from ZipRecruiter, and (b) organic job board traffic to the firm’s career site. Randomization occurs at the individual candidate level through unique identifiers embedded in email links and randomized landing pages. Once assigned, candidates consistently view the same condition.
The second stage of the field experiment will provide the measure of skill quality used in the first stage to examine how degree requirements shape the applicant pool in terms of skill match. To obtain an exogenous measure, I will remove the confounding effects of (i) the job framing and (ii) applicant-pool composition from recruiters’ assessments of quality by randomizing. These removed effects will capture the equilibrium dynamics of the labor market: how—by shaping who applies—degree requirements will influence how recruiters evaluate those who do, which may further reinforce stratification.
To achieve this, surveyed recruiters will be randomly assigned to one of three conditions:
1.Matched Framing and Applicant Pool.
2. Framing Randomization across Fixed Applicant Pools.
3. Joint Randomization of Framing and Applicant Pool.
Task 2: Skill Evaluation of the Full Contacted Pool. A central goal of the study is to assess whether the non-degree holders who self-select out of degree-required postings in Stage 1 are in fact qualified. Answering this requires a skill measure for every contacted candidate, not only for those who applied—precisely the candidates an applicant-only evaluation can never observe. To this end, each recruiter evaluates other occupations drawn from the full contacted pool (applicants and non-applicants).
In this task, the recruiter retains the same job framing assigned in Task 1, holding framing constant across both occupations to prevent recruiters from inferring the experimental manipulation. The candidate pool is randomly drawn from all contacted candidates rather than from applicants alonebut balancing on education, gender, and race. Within this task, I additionally randomize, at the recruiter level, whether candidates' education is visible or blinded.
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