Connecting Unseen Workers to Formal Employment Opportunities: Experimental Evidence from South Africa

High rates of home production, unpaid work and informal work (collectively, “unseen work”) characterise many Sub-Saharan Africa labor markets. Workers engaged in unseen work struggle to demonstrate their human capital to prospective employers, while firms struggle to establish the competencies of workers without formal credentials. We propose a two-sided evaluation of the impact of an innovative technology that enables firms to accurately observe and interpret the human capital of workers with a history of informal work and home production. Simultaneously, we will observe the labor market outcomes of connecting these workers to formal jobs using this technology. The research team will partner with two innovative NGOs, Tabiya and Harambeee. We will use an inclusive skills taxonomy developed and validated for the South African context by Tabiya. The taxonomy will be integrated with the national jobs platform, SAYouth.mobi, managed by unemployment NGO Harambee. We propose a cross-randomized evaluation. First, jobseekers’ CVs are generated using the skills taxonomy. Then, we randomize how this information is presented to employers to test how best to present taxonomy skills to firms. Concurrently, job descriptions are randomized between traditional credential-based and inclusive skill specifications, allowing us to observe how the information from the taxonomy influences job seeker behavior. Secondly, we propose recruiting a sample of firms to introduce to the SAYouth.mobi platform as part of a comprehensive introduction to an inclusive hiring approach to screening job seekers. This will enable us to directly measure the impact of inclusive hiring on firm size.