Ranking occupations by their proximity to workers’ profiles

Information friction makes it difficult for job seekers to find new employment opportunities. We propose a method for providing individual-specific occupation recommendations by ranking occupations based on their proximity to the worker’s profile. We identify a set of twelve skills, abilities and work styles that capture the worker-oriented requirements of all occupations and discuss how to measure these items using online questions and tasks. We use the Euclidean distance between the measured items pertaining to a worker and the requirements of an occupation to measure the proximity between job seekers and occupations. We show that the proximity between job seekers’ profiles and their preunemployment occupation predicts their intention to change occupations, thus suggesting that our method captures a meaningful conceptualization of mismatch. We also show that our method generates recommendations that differ from the previous occupations of mismatched job seekers, thereby potentially expanding their search scope.