Time Is of the Essence: Experimental Evidence on the Effects of Job Application Timing
Employers often begin contacting candidates before their applicant pools are complete. Using a correspondence experiment and a sequential recruiting model, I study how this tradeoff between speed and screening changes who receives consideration, even when qualifications are held fixed.
Abstract
This paper studies the role of job application timing in recruitment. Repurposing the correspondence experiment of Kline, Rose and Walters (2022), I show that, holding vacancy and resume content fixed, first-half experimental applications have a contact rate 1.16 percentage points higher, equivalent to 57 percent of the Black-White contact gap in the same setting. Each day earlier raises contact probability by 0.40 percentage points. The key mechanism is that firms often begin contacting while applications are still being received. Using randomized resume attributes, I instrument whether contact has already begun with the highest predicted contact probability among previously submitted applications. Stronger prior applications trigger earlier initiation, and IV estimates confirm a post-initiation contact penalty. The timing gradient is steeper in tighter labor markets. A sequential model separates applicant arrival rates from the shadow cost of delay and quantifies firms’ tradeoff between earlier contact and the screening-value gains from waiting. Conditional on the firm contacting an experimental application, the highest-ranked application has not yet arrived in 51.6 percent of cases, yielding a 6.6 percent loss relative to the contact-initiating application’s expected screening value. Together, the results provide the first large-scale causal evidence that firms’ sequential contact decisions make queue position consequential within vacancies, revealing an employer-side margin through which labor market conditions shape who is considered.