Most accounts of hiring focus on understanding why a particular job candidate was chosen and do not examine hiring as an outcome for the employer. I suggest that a focus on developing a better understanding of failed searches, job openings which end unfilled, is a valuable, yet understudied, piece of the hiring puzzle. I do so here by highlighting the effect of an employer’s choice set on whether a job offer is extended to any candidate. In particular, I hypothesize that the categorical overlaps among the candidates who apply affect s the likelihood of an offer being extended. Because a hiring decision is one an employer seeks to maximize, comparisons are effortful. The less overlap in the background of job candidate s’, the more difficult it is to compare them, the less likely any decision will be made. To support my contention that this is driven by cognitive effort, I further predict that choice set commensurability issues are less salient for jobs which are more urgent; suggesting variation in satisficing and maximizing motivations. Finally, commensurability is more challenging for employers with greater categorical fluency because differences among candidates are further exacerbated by the employer’s more nuanced expectations. I demonstrate support for my contentions with data from Elance, an online market for freelancing services.

We know a job applicant’s social category affects an employer’s likelihood of hiring them, but we do not know whether, or how, employers update their beliefs regarding members of these social categories. I examine how prior negative and positive hiring experiences of employees from particular countries affects an employer’s subsequent likelihood of hiring applicants from those countries. Analyses of over 26 million applications, from freelancers worldwide, for over 2.2 million jobs on an online labor market demonstrate that employers react more strongly to negative hiring experiences than positive ones. Employers are 14% less likely (versus 8% more likely) to hire freelancers from a country following a prior negative (versus positive) experience. The similarity of the prior job moderates this effect. Prior negative experiences with similar jobs (versus dissimilar jobs) lead employers to be 92% less likely (versus 7% less likely) to hire from that country. Conversely, positive experiences with similar jobs (versus dissimilar jobs) lead employers to be 23% more likely (versus 3% more likely) to subsequently hire from that country. The consequences for switching countries, following negative experiences, are analyzed and wage differences, made to compensate for employer reactions, are calculated. Contributions to the hiring discrimination, impression formation, and gig-economy literatures are discussed.

It is well recognized that organizations play a central role in generating inequality in employment outcomes between women and men. Women are often disadvantaged relative to men when they enter firms either because they are more likely to enter into lower paying positions or into roles that offer less advancement opportunities. What is less well-understood are the mechanisms though which women may be able to overcome these disadvantages. One theoretical solution to this problem is for women to undertake less typical career paths within the firm and move to more fecund jobs and job ladders that offer more opportunity for advancement. However, there is a risk to moving atypically, as erratic careers are often viewed negatively. We investigate this question with monthly observations of 53,311 exempt U.S. employees at a West Coast Fortune 500 tech company over an eight year period, from 2008 to 2015. We first demonstrate that jobs disproportionately staffed by women are, on average, of lower pay and lower advancement opportunities within the firm. We find, erratic career mobility, defined as a sequence of atypical job moves, results in differential outcomes for women and men. Specifically, women who move erratically are promoted faster than similarly erratic men. However, this effect is the opposite for performance appraisals. More erratic mobility by women results in lower performance appraisals than similarly erratic men. Mobility is therefore a double-edged sword for women - we refer to this as the dilemma of mobility.

We propose and test a theory of how decisions not to hire reproduce sex segregation through what we term proportional prejudice. We hypothesize that employers are less likely to hire anyone when the applicant pool contains a large proportion of gender atypical applicants – that is, applicants from a different gender than the typical job holder – because they view this as a signal of a poor quality applicant pool. Analyses, of over seven million job applications for over 700,000 jobs by over 200,000 freelancers on an online platform for contract labor support our contention. A survey experiment isolates the mechanism: Applicant pools with a larger proportion of gender atypical applicants were perceived as less likely to contain people who “seemed skilled enough for the job.” We conclude by demonstrating how our theory explains the mixed findings as to whether gender atypical job seekers are disadvantaged in the hiring process.

Extant hiring research has generally focused on understanding outcomes for employees and not on outcomes for employers. I theorize on how employer cognitive hiring decision processes affect their likelihood of extending an offer of employment. I argue that greater variety in the job experiences of candidates in the applicant pool complicates employer comparison processes. Hiring is a two-stage process and I predict that comparison difficulties materialize among a winnowed down consideration set of candidates in this second stage. More experienced employers have less difficulty with variety because they have better constructed preferences. Regression analyses from an online market for contract labor on over 640,000 job postings by over 170,000 employers support my contentions. Greater variety in job experiences among job candidates in the applicant pool leads to a lower likelihood a job offer will be extended to any of them. This relationship is completely mediated by the variety in job candidates in the second stage consideration set. The more experience an employer has in hiring in a domain, the less of an issue variety becomes. Results utilizing an instrumental variable and several supporting analyses are also reported. Contributions to the study of evaluation in markets, hiring, and cognitive processes of categorization are discussed.

Can employers learn to hire? This article conceptualizes hiring as a dynamic experiential learning process. Instead of examining hiring as a point in time decision, I investigate whether and how employers’ past hiring experiences affect their future decisions. Drawing on evidence from a global online market for contract labor, I argue that employers revise their beliefs regarding job applicants from a particular social category following a negative hiring experience from that social category. I analyze over 16 Million applications from freelancers worldwide for over 2.2 Million jobs from 557,416 employers. I find that employers who have a negative hiring experience with a freelancer from a particular country are subsequently less likely to hire other freelancers from that country. This effect is stronger on hiring for identical subsequent jobs and weaker for other jobs. Most strikingly, evidence from the actual hiring switches following a negative experience and a simulation using data from the observed distribution of freelancers on the platform demonstrate that employers unnecessarily oversteer away from countries given the narrow distribution of observable ability among freelancers. Switches do not result in hiring from a “better” country.

I examine the phenomenon of occupational agglomeration – the observation that workers with similar skills tend to co-locate geographically. Extant explanations point to the fact that industries also tend to agglomerate – thereby creating a need for a particular type of employee to locate there. However, labor markets can pool even when propinquity to employers is not beneficial. I argue that particular types of work become associated with specific geographical locations. This association becomes a categorical stereotype – which leads employers to prefer employees from particular geographic regions because they will seem more appropriate – a form of “spatial signaling.” I test this theory in an online, virtual marketplace for freelancing services. I find that the greater the association between a particular job category and a country – what I termjob specific geographic identity– the more likelyanyfreelancer from that country will win a job in that category. I also find this effect is stronger when a freelancer has no previous relevant experience but a bad experience by a buyer (at this job/country intersection) can eliminate this positive effect. This effect holds net of other explanations such as spatial mismatch, knowledge spillovers, and input cost advantages.

Extant hiring research has generally focused on understanding outcomes for employees and not on outcomes for employers. I theorize on how employer cognitive hiring decision processes affect their likelihood of extending an offer of employment. I argue that greater variety in the job experiences of candidates in the applicant pool complicates employer comparison processes. Hiring is a two-stage process and I predict that comparison difficulties materialize among a winnowed down consideration set of candidates in this second stage. More experienced employers have less difficulty with variety because they have better constructed preferences. Regression analyses from an online market for contract labor on over 640,000 job postings by over 170,000 employers support my contentions. Greater variety in job experiences among job candidates in the applicant pool leads to a lower likelihood a job offer will be extended to any of them. This relationship is completely mediated by the variety in job candidates in the second stage consideration set. The more experience an employer has in hiring in a domain, the less of an issue variety becomes. Results utilizing an instrumental variable and several supporting analyses are also reported. Contributions to the study of evaluation in markets, hiring, and cognitive processes of categorization are discussed.

If categorical boundaries serve to assist audiences in lumping together like organizations and separating different ones, then does an organization’s reputation also remain similarly bounded? We conceptualize reputation as an assessment of an actor’s ability or quality, but in the circumscribed domain of an identified category. We hypothesize that reputation acts differentlydepending both on the relevance and focus (read: distance and spanning) of a marketparticipant’s past experiences. We examine an online market for freelancing services. We find that better reputations benefit those sellers who have more relevant experiences with regard to a focal category. However, for those with poor reputations, this disadvantage is ameliorated as distance from the focal category is increased. For those sellers with better reputations, spanningacts detrimentally on their reputational advantage. Yet for those with poor reputations, spanning decreases their disadvantage vis-à-vis their better reputational alters. We also employ a novelmeasure of categorical distance using a text overlap measure.