Rejection Communication and Women’s Job-Search Persistence
35 Pages Posted: 2 Nov 2021
Date Written: October 22, 2021
Abstract
We examine whether the reasons that employers provide for rejecting job candidates affect their likelihood of applying for future positions, and differential responses by gender. Through a randomized controlled field experiment among job candidates rejected for positions by a staffing company, we find that relative to men, women are less likely to apply for future positions after being rejected. Furthermore, we find that this gap is nearly eliminated by informing applicants that they were rejected for “fit” rather than “quality” or by providing no reason for the job rejection. We present survey evidence that workers view the quality message as demeaning and the no-reason message as ambiguous. Our findings lend support for hypotheses that women have relative tastes for non-competitive and transparent application procedures, and that gender disparity in job search persistence may be reduced by framing rejection in terms of fit.
Keywords: gender, recruiting, job search, matching, procedural justice, field experiments
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