How do recruiters make hiring decisions? How does experience of early job-insecurity / unemployment impact the chances of young job applicants?
This were the questions that NEGOTIATE researchers investigated and analyzed by running an employer‐sided survey with an integrated multidimensional vignette experiment in Bulgaria, Greece, Norway and Switzerland. Recruiters were invited to express their views on applications of candidates who experienced employment instability/unemployment, have different education levels, and gender.
To make sure that the results resemble outcomes of a real hiring process, the real vacancies were sampled, and recruiters who were questioned were behind the job advertisements. The aim of study “Understanding unemployment scars: A vignette experiment of employers’ decisions in Bulgaria, Greece, Norway and Switzerland” is to examine the role of employers play in the inclusion and exclusion of young adults who have experiences early job insecurity as an objective phenomenon in the labour market. Persisting consequences of employment instability and unemployment have come to be known as scarring effects.
The impact of education, economic labour market conditions and employment policies on employer behaviour were of special interest. What kind of job profiles are recruiters looking for and what experiences are examined with caution? One of the basic problems employers face during recruitment is the limited amount of accessible information on job applicants. Within a short space of time and with limited resources, recruiters try to find out as much as possible about the job candidates’ productivity.
During the first stage of the hiring process, employers often have to entirely rely upon limited information extracted from CVs. The questions regarding what sort of information they draw upon from the CVs in order to predict the suitability of the candidates for a specific position, and how they interpret this information have brought about many studies in social sciences building on different theoretical concepts: human capital theory, job market signaling theory and employer discrimination theory.
PHOTO CREDIT: Markus Spiske / raumrot.com