G²LM|LIC- Assisting Job Search in Low-Employment Communities

In the original research project, two interventions that are designed to help young urban dwellers search for employment by removing spatial and informational obstacles to job search were evaluated experimentally in Addis Ababa. The first intervention was a transport subsidy lowering the cost of job search. In Addis Ababa, job seekers needed to make regular trips to the centre of town to look for job opportunities. The subsidy covers the cost of this journey. The second intervention was a job application workshop, designed to improve job seekers’ ability to signal their skills to employers. Participants were offered orientation on how to make effective job applications using CVs and cover letters, and on how to approach job interviews. Further, they took a mix of standardised personnel selection tests. Firm Survey The survey was conducted with a focus on understand the beliefs that each side of the market holds. The firm survey carefully elicits firm managers’ beliefs about the ability of jobseekers. Ability is measured as a jobseeker performance on a Raven test. The expectations both with respect to tertiary-educated applicants and high-school graduates were documented. The survey enables to measure the accuracy of beliefs. In particular, it is possible to contrast firms' answers with the true empirical counterparts obtained from the jobseeker survey and vice versa. Jobseeker Survey The jobseeker survey focused on reservation wages, the distribution of wages across sectors and the expected duration of unemployment. Beliefs about the distribution of wages were elicited by asking the jobseeker what proportion of jobs currently advertised paid a wage lower than a set of thresholds. Similarly, reservation wages we elicited by asking the jobseeker whether they would accept a job that would pay at least a certain amount. This amount was decreased until the wage bracket corresponding to the jobseeker reservation wage was found. To minimise complexity, the elicitation of beliefs among jobseekers were not incentivised. Finally, after belief elicitation was completed, jobseekers took a 12-item Raven test.