Information and Employee Hiring: Evidence from a Randomized Intervention in Public Schools

• In Event: Strategic and Efficient School Staffing

Abstract

A well-developed literature in personnel economics emphasizes the challenges of making good hiring decisions (e.g., Heneman and Judge, 2003; Lazear and Shaw, 2007). But determining who will be effective is difficult; asymmetric information abounds, as job seekers have more information about their own skills and motivation than hiring managers. In an ideal world, hiring managers would gather low-cost, high-value information about job candidates to make better hiring decisions. But research currently offers little guidance on what that might entail. In this study, we examine the issue in the context of public school teachers. We report on the extent to which information collected from professional references influences hiring manager assessments of applicants and hiring decisions.

Professional references are widely used in hiring decisions, yet their effectiveness remains largely understudied. We partnered with Spokane Public Schools (henceforth “Spokane”) to collect categorical ratings of applicants from references in addition to the letters of recommendation they already provide. Prior work found that reference ratings are predictive of teacher performance (Goldhaber et al., 2024) and retention (Goldhaber and Grout, 2024). In the current study, we report on the results of an experiment, in which we provide the reference ratings to hiring managers for a random subset of applicants, obtaining causal estimates of whether the reference ratings influence hiring managers’ assessments of applicants and hiring choices.

The results reveal that providing the reference ratings information to hiring managers does not influence their evaluations or choices. Given the precision of the estimates, we can rule out changes smaller than 1 percentage point in hiring probability. This finding is consistent with Jacob et al. (2018), who study the teacher hiring process in Washington, DC, who also find that information available to hiring officials is predictive of in-service outcomes but is not utilized. That the information from professional references does not influence hiring appears to be a lost opportunity as prior found them to be predictive future job performance. Indeed, we provide novel evidence that reference ratings add to the predictive power of the information regularly collected and processed about applicants, suggesting the ratings indeed add information to the hiring process.

Our findings contribute to the broader field of personnel economics by providing evidence on the degree to which specific human resource management practices are related to productivity and hiring. At the same time, we contribute to the literature on teacher hiring in education. The importance of hiring in K12 education is well-recognized, given the profound impacts teachers can have on short and long-run student outcomes (e.g., Chetty et al., 2014). Given evidence that low-performing teachers are unlikely to catch up with higher-performing peers (Atteberry et al., 2013) and that it is costly to remove ineffective teachers (National Council on Teacher Quality, 2014; Treu, 2014), poor hiring decisions in education carry extra weight.

Authors

• Dan Goldhaber, American Institutes for Research

• Cyrus Grout, University of Washington