Helping Low-Wage Workers Find Better Jobs: Skills-First Matching and Job-Quality Nudges
Nearly half of U.S. workers ages 18–65 (44%) earn low hourly wages, and roughly 6 million Americans remain below the poverty line despite being employed, which underscores that a job alone does not guarantee economic security. Job-to-job transitions to higher-quality employers are a key pathway out of poverty, and yet low-wage jobseekers have little reliable information about which employers offer wage growth, stability, and decent working conditions. This project builds on Nyshadham’s prior randomized controlled trial (RCT) with entry-level jobseekers, where skills-based AI-assisted job matching combined with jobseeker preferences increased employment by 7 percentage points (a 12.3% increase) relative to a standard job-search platform. A new RCT will build on those findings by working with 1,500 low-wage workers across select metropolitan areas – including Detroit – to layer job-quality signals on the AI-assisted job matching platform. The goal is to assess whether better information can redirect people’s job search toward higher-quality jobs and improve long-run economic security.
Anant Nyshadham, associate professor at the Ross School of Business