Overview
This series examines how changes in the supply of suitable applicants facing regular, permanent vacancies in Austria affect search thresholds, filling speed, match durability, starting wages, and workforce composition. Evidence from roughly 1.2 million vacancies on the Austrian public employment-service board, linked to worker records, explains why a deeper pool can help vacancies fill sooner and hires last longer while strengthening employer bargaining power and reinforcing existing gender and nationality patterns. It also examines the mass-layoff identification strategy, its local causal margin, and the limits of using referred first-week applications as a proxy for total supply. The preliminary evidence covers vacancies posted from 2002 through 2019, so the mechanism travels more confidently than exact estimates.
Learning outcomes
- More applicants can shorten vacancies and lengthen subsequent job tenure in Austrian evidence.
- A deeper pool raises both candidate arrivals and the firm's reservation threshold, with speed depending on the cost of delay.
- In the study, a one-standard-deviation increase in applications meant roughly three fewer vacancy days and two more months of tenure.
- The same abundance lowered discretionary starting pay and reinforced existing gender and nationality hiring patterns.
- The estimates are local to Austrian vacancies affected by nearby mass layoffs, not universal returns to recruiting volume.
Keywords
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PlansFAQ
Do more applicants produce better hires in Austria?
The study estimates that, for locally affected Austrian vacancies, more applicants led to faster filling and longer tenure, in a pattern consistent with better fit. They also lowered discretionary starting pay and reinforced existing hiring patterns, so “better” depends on the outcome.
Why can more applicants lower starting wages?
More applicants strengthen the firm's outside option: it can reject an offer and keep searching, reducing the worker's bargaining leverage. In this study, a one-standard-deviation increase in applications lowered starting wages about 3.1%, with little effect near collectively bargained floors.
How does applicant supply affect gender and nationality hiring?
In the Austrian study, larger pools made firms' existing gender and nationality patterns more pronounced through employer selection. Applicant composition also mattered for nationality, explaining about 40% of that gradient.
How generalizable is the evidence on applicant supply?
The estimates are local to Austrian vacancies whose pools changed after nearby mass layoffs and to the marginal applicants supplied through that channel. They do not establish a universal effect across countries, occupations, or recruitment platforms; the interpretation also depends on exclusion and application-measurement assumptions.