Targeting Support Using Job Seekers' Biases: A Randomized Experiment

Abstract

Most digital job-search assistance encourages unemployed workers to broaden their search toward related occupations, targeting one important source of search inefficiency: insufficient occupational diversification. Our analysis suggests that the relevant margin of adjustment depends on the underlying search problem. Building on a detailed analysis of job seekers' beliefs and search behavior, we identify a large group of pessimistic workers for whom the main constraints are low search effort and low aspirations, rather than insufficient occupational diversification. This diagnosis points to an unexpected intervention: rather than encouraging these workers to search in new occupations, we encourage them to search more intensively and apply for better-paying jobs within the occupations they already consider. We evaluate this diagnosis-based intervention, alongside a standard occupational recommendation, in a large-scale randomized experiment conducted with the French Public Employment Service. The motivational intervention increases search effort, raises reservation wages, and improves reemployment outcomes along the predicted margins. Occupational recommendations, by contrast, primarily benefit workers whose search problem lies in the allocation of attention across occupations and operate by activating existing perceptions rather than correcting beliefs. More broadly, our findings show how digital platforms can combine subjective expectations, behavioral data, targeted interventions, and randomized experimentation to diagnose job seekers' needs and iteratively improve intervention design.