Recruiting Intensity, Hires, and Vacancies: Evidence from Firm-Level Data

Eliza Forsythe and Russell Weinstein

No 14138, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We investigate employer recruiting behavior, using detailed firm-level data from a national survey of employers hiring recent college graduates. We show employers adjust recruiting effort, hiring standards, and compensation with the business cycle, beliefs about tightness, and their own hiring plans. We then show that firms expending greater recruiting effort hire more individuals per vacancy. The results suggest that when firms want to increase hires they adjust vacancies and recruiting intensity per vacancy, which may help explain the breakdown in the standard matching function during the Great Recession. Our measure of recruiting effort explains roughly 16% of the residual elasticity of the vacancy yield with respect to hires.

Keywords: recruiting intensity; vacancy yield; labor market search and matching; recent college graduates (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D20 E24 J63 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 44 pages
Date: 2021-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-lab and nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp14138.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:iza:izadps:dp14138

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().