Abstract
Getting the unemployed back into work is an important policy agenda and the central mandate for employment agencies. But the tools available to employment agencies, e.g. search verification, or active labor market programs, do not yet support job seekers much in solving one of the key challenges of job search finding the right vacancies to apply to. Job seekers may be looking for jobs that are not well suited for them, or out of the range that is feasible. In addition, job seekers may face cognitive challenges due to anxiety and stress, which reduce working memory and impair decisions, affecting their capacity to learn from their own experience, or search for diverse sets of job positions. We propose a field experiment to improve job search with three interventions: (i) improve the match between job seekers and vacancies based on new information on the job seeker ("J4U" intervention), and (ii) provide cognitive training that has been shown to improve participants' ability to plan activities, work on multiple tasks in parallel, and make decisions ("COG" intervention). These abilities are central in job search.