Monster.com finally vindicated

It might seem obvious that the Internet makes finding a job easier. But oddly enough, that’s not what a number of economic studies have concluded in the past. One 2004 study, for instance, found that unemployed workers who search for jobs online actually stay unemployed longer than similar workers who didn’t.

(Rick Bowmer/AP) But that study looked at matters circa 1998. Hasn’t the Internet changed considerably since then? Turns out, it has. A new paper by UC Santa Barbara’s Peter Kuhn and UC Denver’s Hani Mansour found that looking for jobs online now cuts a person’s length of unemployment, on average, by 25 percent. At long last, the Internet is helping us find jobs more quickly. (It doesn’t, however, help people find better jobs—the authors found little effect on wage growth.)

So what’s changed? The Internet’s gotten more popular, mainly. In the past decade, the authors note, the share of young, unemployed workers searching for jobs online tripled, from 24 to 74 percent. More users make the network more efficient.

This calls to mind Kevin Carey’s excellent piece in the recent Washington Monthly about a new company, ConnectEDU, that’s trying to use the Internet to make better matches between colleges and students. The current admissions process, as Carey explains, is woefully inefficient—colleges often have no way of finding qualified students apart from blasting out mailers and clumsy college fairs, while kids often apply in scattershot fashion to too many colleges or go to unsuitable colleges. An Internet matching system—something akin to Match.com—could revolutionize all that. Although, as the studies on online job-searching suggest, it isn’t likely to succeed until the number of participants becomes very, very large.