A well-written résumé can improve someone’s chances of being hired—but maybe not for the reasons you would think.
In a working paper distributed by NBER in January, a team of researchers from MIT Sloan investigated what happened when jobseekers on “a large online labor market” were offered a free automated editing service as they wrote résumés. The researchers hypothesized that eliminating spelling and grammar errors, and making the language more clear, would improve a candidate’s prospects for obtaining a job.
The research team randomized nearly a half million job seekers into a treatment group, which was offered the service, and a control group that was not. Compared to the control group the treatment group wrote résumés with fewer spelling and grammar errors. They were 7.8% more likely to be offered a job and were offered wages that were 8.4% higher on average.
Finding that job candidates whose résumés had fewer errors had better job outcomes may seem unsurprising. Fewer errors might suggest to hiring employers that a job candidate can communicate effectively and is detail-oriented. Other studies have shown that higher writing quality on job applications increases “callbacks,” the authors observe, but no study has been conducted on such a massive scale.
But the view that writing quality on a résumé reveals ability may be mistaken, according to co-author Emma van Inwegen, a Ph.D. student at MIT Sloan. They call this “the signaling view.” Instead, the researchers argue that, at least sometimes, we should adopt “the clarity view.”
According to the clarity view, better writing improves job outcomes simply because it communicates more clearly. Employers can more easily understand what a well-written résumé says, and therefore, their hiring decisions are better informed.
To support the clarity view, the researchers show that employers who hired people from the treatment group were slightly more satisfied with their new hires, despite the treatment being randomly assigned and thus not more capable on average. In other words, the employers were not tricked by the tool into thinking job candidates’ abilities were better than they really were.
The study included more than 480,000 participants, divided evenly into the treatment and control groups.
The study has broad relevance. It suggests that language errors on applications do not always “signal” an applicant’s abilities. The study also suggests that, by using editing software, jobseekers might increase the probability that they will be offered a job and higher wages. And if applicants have access to editing software, job markets and hiring organizations may make more rational hiring decisions, unclouded by the fog of error.