Motivating job seekers. A field experiment

Bart Cockx (), Johan Egebark (), Greet Van Hoye (), Emilie Videnord () and Johan Vikström ()
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Bart Cockx: Ghent University
Johan Egebark: Swedish Public Employment Service
Greet Van Hoye: Ghent University
Emilie Videnord: Swedish Public Employment Service
Johan Vikström: IFAU and Uppsala University

No 2026:8, Working Paper Series from IFAU - Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy

Abstract: educed motivation among jobseekers over the unemployment spell may lead to declining job-finding rates. We report findings from a low-cost digital intervention with motivational emails aimed at enhancing and sustaining motivation and search effort among job seekers in Sweden. Using a randomized controlled trial that included 200,720 job seekers, we evaluate both carrot messages aimed at encouraging the pursuit of personal goals and intrinsic motivation and stick messages focusing on external pressure and constraints. A large share of job seekers opened the emails, and they triggered behavioral responses. Both types of messages backfired, reducing search effort and job-finding rates. The carrot messages reduced both the number of job applications and job finding, particularly among men. One likely explanation is that these messages signal to job seekers that the Public Employment Service was less controlling than initially perceived, prompting a reduction in effort. The stick messages backfired for job seekers who, at the onset of unemployment, reported that they were motivated by an inner drive rather than by constraints. These findings underscore the challenges of motivating job seekers to actively search for jobs and suggest that low-cost digital interventions, in isolation, are inadequate and may even be counterproductive.

Keywords: Job search motivation; Job-finding rates; Digital interventions Behavioral interventions Randomized controlled trial (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A12 D01 D91 J64 J68 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 69 pages
Date: 2026-04-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp
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