Finding a job in the internet age

Abstract

Internet job searching offers an empirical setting in which to explore the trade-off between quality and quantity of information. As both firms and workers turn to the internet for unprecedented amounts of labor market information, it is unclear whether this makes the matching process more efficient. Using longitudinal data on two samples of unemployed job searchers in 1998 and 2000, I establish the rise of the internet as a job-search strategy and assess whether searching online increased the short-term probability of finding a job. Results suggest the internet's contribution to an unemployed searcher's information pool may afford a small advantage only to the extent that other job searchers are not using it, perhaps due to an inverse relationship between search and screening costs in a two-sided market. © The University of North Carolina Press.