When to Broaden, When to Focus: Job Search and Market Tightness

This paper investigates whether directing job search toward tight labor markets improves re-employment. Such targeting is theoretically attractive as it reduces aggregate congestion. I link Swiss unemployment records to clickstream search data to measure which markets jobseekers target. To address selection, I exploit quasi-random assignment to caseworkers differing in their tendency to redirect clients toward tight markets. Moving from the 10th to the 90th percentile raises six-month job-finding by 2.7%. The channels are heterogeneous: jobseekers who become unemployed in slack markets gain from mobility, consistent with prior findings from policies that encourage broader search. The new insight is that jobseekers who become unemployed in tight markets benefit from a narrower focus on this initial market. Effects are orthogonal to other caseworker behaviors and do not come at the expense of job quality. My findings suggest that market tightness offers a simple basis for targeted search advice.