South Carolina Reemployment Services and Eligibility Assessments (RESEA) Randomized Controlled of Automated Job Referrals

In this study, we will estimate causal impacts of providing frequent, timely, and customized automated job vacancy referrals to unemployment insurance (UI) beneficiaries on job search, UI receipt and duration, and labor market outcomes.We will randomly assign South Carolina Reemployment Services and Eligibility Assessments (RESEA) participants to receive staff-assisted registration for an automated job referral service called Virtual Recruiter® (VR).While all of South Carolina's UI beneficiaries may register themselves for VR within the SCWorks Online System portal, participation in this service currently is quite low among RESEA participants.Thus, there is much scope for staff assistance in VR registration to increase participation in the service, to increase engagement with job vacancy postings, and, potentially, to speed reemployment and UI exit.We plan to enroll the RESEA population to the experimental treatment during a twelve-month period.We expect that the intervention will involve random assignment of about 17,000 UI beneficiaries referred to RESEA, providing power to detect effect sizes of magnitudes that we may reasonably expect.