IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cpr/ceprdp/20249.html

Advising Job Seekers in Occupations with Poor Prospects: A Field Experiment

Author

Listed:
  • Belot, Michèle
  • de Koning, Bart
  • Fouarge, Didier
  • Kircher, Philipp
  • Muller, Paul
  • Phlippen, Sandra

Abstract

We study the impact of online information provision to unemployed job seekers who are looking for work in occupations in slack markets, i.e. with only few vacancies per job seeker. Job seekers received suggestions about suitable alternative occupations, and how the prospects of these alternatives compare to their current occupation of interest. Some additionally received a link to a motivational video. We evaluate the interventions using a randomized field experiment covering all eligible job seekers registered to search in the target occupations. The vast majority of treated job seekers open the message revealing the alternative suggestions. The motivational video is rarely watched. Effects on unemployed job seekers in structurally poor labor markets are large: their employment, hours of work and labor income all improve by 5% to 6% after 18 months. Additional survey evidence shows that treated job seekers find employment in more diverse occupations.

Suggested Citation

  • Belot, Michèle & de Koning, Bart & Fouarge, Didier & Kircher, Philipp & Muller, Paul & Phlippen, Sandra, 2025. "Advising Job Seekers in Occupations with Poor Prospects: A Field Experiment," CEPR Discussion Papers 20249, Centre for Economic Policy Research.
    • Handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:20249
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://cepr.org/publications/DP20249
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Jeremias Klaeui, 2026. "When to Broaden, When to Focus: Job Search and Market Tightness," CESifo Working Paper Series 12744, CESifo.
    2. Dabed, Diego & Genz, Sabrina & Rademakers, Emilie, 2025. "Equalising the effects of automation? The role of task overlap for job finding," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 96(C).
    3. Bart de Koning & Paul Muller & Michèle Belot & Yvonne Engels & Didier Fouarge & Mario Keer & Philipp Kircher & Sandra Phlippen, 2026. "Online Buddies for Job Seekers: A Field Experiment," NBER Working Papers 34912, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;

    JEL classification:

    • J62 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers - - - Job, Occupational and Intergenerational Mobility; Promotion
    • J63 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers - - - Turnover; Vacancies; Layoffs
    • C93 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - Field Experiments

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:20249. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CEPR (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://cepr.org/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.