Delegation in Hiring: Evidence from a Two-Sided Audit

Bo Cowgill and Patryk Perkowski

No 11129, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: Firms increasingly delegate job screening to third-party recruiters, who must not only satisfy employers’ demand for different types of candidates, but also manage yield by anticipating candidates’ likelihood of accepting offers. We study how recruiters balance these objectives in a novel, two-sided field experiment. Our results suggest that candidates’ behavior towards employers is very correlated, but that employers’ hiring behavior is more idiosyncratic. Workers discriminate using the race and gender of the employer’s leaders more than employers discriminate against the candidate’s race and gender. Black and female candidates face particularly high uncertainty, as their callback rates vary widely across employers. Callback decisions place about two thirds weight on employer’s expected behavior and one third on yield management. We conclude by discussing the accuracy of recruiter beliefs and how they impact labor market sorting.

Keywords: hiring; recruiting; discrimination; field experiments (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 J71 M51 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-acc, nep-exp and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp11129.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Delegation in Hiring: Evidence from a Two-Sided Audit (2024)
Working Paper: Delegation in Hiring: Evidence from a Two-Sided Audit (2024)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_11129

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().