Reaching Marginalized Job Seekers through Public Employment Services: Experimental Evidence from Ethiopia

We present findings from an at-scale randomized trial of a government program providing public employment services in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, with up-to-date vacancy information. Before the program, women with relatively less education searched more narrowly with worse labor market outcomes than the rest of our representative sample of relevant job seekers. These women also have lower direct intervention take-up than the rest of the sample. However, only these women significantly increase applications, receive more offers, shift from household enterprise work to wage employment, and experience higher earnings in response to the intervention. These employment impacts are larger than can be explained by vacancies directly curated through the intervention. Instead, these women adjust search behavior, expectations, and employment aspirations more broadly. Notably, offers come through friends and family networks, their modal baseline search method, underscoring the potential role of social networks in disseminating employment information to the most marginalized job seekers.