Assoc. Prof. Roland Rathelot, Ph.D.

Should we help employers hire (and how)?

Over the last few decades, the internet has made it much easier for employers and job seekers to connect, yet overall unemployment hasn’t changed much. This could be because limited access to accurate and useful information isn't the main cause of unemployment – or because today’s tools and systems still don’t allow for clear and honest communication between companies and job seekers. Employers, who often struggle to find the right candidates, still find it difficult and expensive to screen and select new employees. In his current research project, funded by an ERC Consolidator Grant, Roland Rathelot is developing new ways to understand what kinds of information gaps still exist in the job market, how much they affect unemployment – especially among the most vulnerable groups – and what can be done to make hiring more effective.

This project brings together new data about how companies search for candidates on large job websites, along with official records on job openings and employee histories. It also includes a series of randomied experiments to test whether giving employers better information – about candidates or about how the job market works – helps them make smarter hiring decisions. The goal is to boost total hiring and improve the quality of job matches. This research is currently being carried out in Austria and France.

Mr. Rathelot is a labor economist whose work focuses on how people look for jobs and how companies hire. He also studies inequality in the job market, including discrimination, segregation, and the effects of job training. He has worked with data from countries including France, Sweden, India, and the United States. During his time at CES, he will be continuing his project on how better information can improve hiring and what policies might help reduce these information gaps.

Roland Rathelot is a Professor of Economics at ENSAE – Institut Polytechnique de Paris and a researcher at CREST. He is affiliated with several international research organizations (CEPR, J-PAL, IZA) and is currently an editor at the Economic Journal. Before joining ENSAE, he was an Associate Professor at the University of Warwick in the UK.