How Can AI Improve Search and Matching? Evidence From 59 Million Personalized Job Recommendations

78 Pages Posted: 16 Nov 2023

See all articles by Thomas Le Barbanchon

Thomas Le Barbanchon

Bocconi university; Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR)

Lena Hensvik

IFAU - Institute for Labour Market Policy Evaluation

Roland Rathelot

University of Warwick

Date Written: july 24, 2023

Abstract

We explore how Artificial Intelligence can be leveraged to help frictional markets to clear. We design a collaborative-filtering machine-learning job recommender system that uses job seekers’ click history to generate relevant personalised job recommendations. We deploy it at scale on the largest online job board in Sweden, and design a clustered two-sided randomised experiment to evaluate its impact on job search and labor-market outcomes. Combining platform data with unemployment and employment registers, we find that treated job seekers are more likely to click and apply to recommended jobs, and have 0.6% higher employment within the 6 months following first exposure to recommendations. At the job-worker pair level, we document that recommending a vacancy to a job seeker increases the probability to work at this workplace by 5%. Leveraging the two-sided vacancy-worker randomisation or the market-level randomisation, we find limited congestion effects. We find that employment effects are larger for workers that are less-educated, unemployed, and have initially a large geographic scope of search, for jobs that are attached to several jobs, and are relatively older. Results also suggest that recommendations expanding the occupational scope yield higher effects.

Keywords: recommender system, job search

JEL Classification: J2, J6

Suggested Citation

Le Barbanchon, Thomas and Hensvik, Lena and Rathelot, Roland, How Can AI Improve Search and Matching? Evidence From 59 Million Personalized Job Recommendations (july 24, 2023). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4604814

Thomas Le Barbanchon (Contact Author)

Bocconi university ( email )

Via Sarfatti, 25
Milan, MI 20136
Italy

Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) ( email )

London
United Kingdom

Lena Hensvik

IFAU - Institute for Labour Market Policy Evaluation ( email )

Box 513
751 20 Uppsala
Sweden

Roland Rathelot

University of Warwick ( email )

Gibbet Hill Rd.
Coventry, CV4 8UW
United Kingdom

Do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on SSRN?

Paper statistics

Downloads
146
Abstract Views
413
PlumX Metrics