蜜桃视频

In a new working paper, 鈥�,鈥� researchers use five years of data on job vacancies, applications, and hiring in a large firm to create a model that aims to deepen our understanding of how companies choose which candidates to hire and what to pay them.

鈥淟abor economists know little about how workers and firms match up,鈥� says Rebecca Lessem, Associate Professor of Economics at 蜜桃视频鈥檚 Tepper School of Business, who led the study. 鈥淧revious studies have documented persistent wage gaps by race and gender; we focused on how the search and matching process contributes to these disparities.鈥�

Among the challenges to studying job search processes, the authors say, is that data on who applies to jobs and how firms choose candidates are scarce. Also, hiring is typically a multi-stage process in which firms鈥� consideration of viable candidates shrinks with each step until a job is filled. Yet understanding the hiring processes is important, according to the authors, in part because it is difficult to accurately predict how a new policy would affect labor market outcomes without analyzing its effects at each step of the hiring process.

Researchers used five years of data from a large firm (approximately 65,000 workers), tracking the progress of all applicants for each vacancy (a total of nearly 39,500 individuals), including initial screening, interview selection, and job offers. They supplemented these data with information on annual wages and their division for every employee in the organization over more than two decades.

Using these data, researchers developed a dynamic noncooperative game in which hiring occurred over three stages: 1) Employees within the firm and outsiders chose which positions to apply for when vacancies arose, 2) an interview committee selected a set of candidates to interview, and 3) a manager chose from candidates who were interviewed whom to hire and what salary to offer them.

Next, they predicted how hiring outcomes and stakeholders鈥� benefits would change under alternative mechanisms (e.g., race- and gender-blind interview selections at the second stage), evaluating how these would affect the composition of hires, the terms of employment, and the surplus generated by the firm. Among the study鈥檚 findings:

• The preferences of the hiring committee and the manager differed significantly. Eliminating these differences increased both how many women and minority candidates were hired and the firm鈥檚 expected surplus.
• At the same time, the hiring committee served a useful role in narrowing the applicant pool by screening applicants before interviews occurred.
• When the interview committee was race- and gender-blind, the share of minority hires increased significantly, highlighting the extent to which hiring procedures shape workforce composition.
• Taking a sequential approach to hiring rather than establishing the number of interviews in advance boosted the manager鈥檚 surplus when there were many applications, mostly from gains from interviewing more applicants.

鈥淢any past studies have examined workers鈥� search behavior and the frictions that shape their efforts to find jobs, but the process through which firms select among applicants is less researched,鈥� explains Robert A. Miller, Richard M. Cyert and Morris DeGroot Professorship in Economics and Statistics, and Professor of Economics and Strategy at Carnegie Mellon鈥檚 Tepper School, who coauthored the study. 鈥淥ur work is unique in that we structurally estimated a model using data on firms鈥� actual interview and hiring choices.鈥�

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Summarized from a working paper, Matching Applicants to Vacancies: An Empirical Model of Multistage Hiring, by Lessem, R (蜜桃视频), and Miller, RA (蜜桃视频). Copyright 2026. All rights reserved.