Original title: Targeting Support Using Job Seekers' Biases: A Randomized Experiment
Bruno Crépon, Aurélien Frot, Christophe Gaillac · August 2026
Most digital job tools urge unemployed workers to look into new career fields. However, researchers studied workers' beliefs and search behavior and found that the best help depends on the actual problem. They identified a large group of pessimistic workers whose main obstacles are low effort and low pay goals, not a lack of different job types. Instead of telling them to branch out, the researchers urged them to search harder and aim for better-paying jobs in the fields they already knew. In a large experiment with the French Public Employment Service, this motivational push increased search effort, raised workers' lowest acceptable wages, and improved reemployment outcomes. Meanwhile, advising people to look at new jobs helped those who had trouble splitting their attention, working by activating existing views rather than fixing incorrect beliefs.
You are trying to find a good restaurant for dinner. If you feel pessimistic, you might barely look and settle for the first cheap place, rather than exploring new neighborhoods. The usual advice is to try different areas, but that misses the real problem: you are not searching hard enough or aiming high enough. In this paper, the researchers found that for pessimistic job seekers, the issue is similar, so they encourage searching more intensively and aiming for better jobs within the occupations they already consider.
Unemployment services often tell job seekers to look in new fields, but this doesn't help everyone. This research shows that for pessimistic workers, the real problem is low effort and low aspirations, so encouraging them to search more and aim higher within their current occupations improves outcomes. Tailoring support to individual biases could make job search assistance far more effective.
The experiment is conducted in France with the public employment service, so generalizability to other contexts is unclear. The intervention targets only pessimistic workers; other types of job seekers may need different support. The study does not measure long-term employment outcomes or cost-effectiveness.
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Targeting Support Using Job Seekers' Biases: A Randomized Experiment — Bruno Crépon, Aurélien Frot, Christophe Gaillac
Abstract licence: CC0
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper. This is a preprint, so it hasn't necessarily been peer reviewed.