Referral Ties and Persistence in Job Search | WIP Seminar with Santiago Campero

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Prior research suggests that experiencing rejection impacts the persistence of job-seekers in the labor market. Further, how the rejection is handled by employers influences its potential discouraging effects. In this paper, I argue that referral ties between a job-seeker and individuals at a target employer enable better post-rejection communication, giving referral candidates a more favorable post-rejection experience. Therefore, referral candidates are more likely to persist in pursuing an employer after being initially turned down. Importantly, because job-seekers can learn about how to most effectively pursue an employer through prior recruitment experiences, their hiring chances improve with these experiences. Using data from recruitments undertaken by a sample of U.S.-based high-tech firms through a common job applicant tracking system as well as from a survey of job-seekers, I find evidence consistent with these claims. Job candidates who reach a firm via a network referral are much more likely than candidates without such ties to pursue jobs at the firm after being initially rejected. Further, their chances of being hired increase on subsequent applications. I discuss the implications of these findings for theories of persistence in job search and of the role of networks in labor markets.

Bio: Before coming to the CIRHR, Santiago Campero was an Assistant Professor of Human Resource Management at HEC Montreal. Santiago received a BSc in Engineering from the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City, an MBA from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley and a PhD in Management from MIT. Prior to beginning his academic career, he worked as a management consultant at McKinsey and Company. Trained as an economic sociologist, Santiago’s research explores the origins of various forms of inequality in the labor markets and organizations. His research has a particular focus on examining these issues in the context of high-tech startups, a sector that is both an important driver of job creation as well as one where certain groups of workers (e.g., women, certain ethnic groups) are persistently under-represented.