Hiring in Online Labor Markets: The Role of Jobspecific Experience

This paper investigates the role of workers’ job-specific experience on employers’ hiring decisions in online labor markets. Relying on textual descriptions of job postings and natural language processing techniques, we design a novel metric that measures how well a worker’s past experience fits the requirements of a specific job. We show that our job-specific experience metric is a significant predictor of whether the employee will be hired for each specific job, even when accounting for observable worker- and job-level idiosyncratic factors and overall market competition