Learning through interviews and hires: employer search and experimentation in the job matching process

This paper analyzes employers' search strategies in hiring using an online market for outsourced services. Employer search patterns are consistent with learning about the distribution of employee productivity initially and then subsequently exploiting the information gained through initial experimentation. Employers tend to interview several applicants with varied characteristics when making a first hire. After a successful initial hire, employers interview fewer subsequent candidates and target candidates with similar characteristics. If past hiring was not successful, employers continue to interview intensively. Because experimentation in interviews and hiring results in local knowledge about the mapping from worker characteristics to job match productivity, the results suggest that the employer search process results in relatively homogeneous pools of matches over time.