Looking for a Job? More People Will Apply If You Do

I don't know about you but if I know how many people have applied for the same job, I get a little depressed.  Now a new study says that the more applications a job has on LinkedIn, the more people will apply.

 Maybe they're more confident than I!  In any event, telling job applicants how many people applied for a job on LinkedIn – regardless of whether the number of applicants was high or low – increased the number of applications, a finding that could help companies that are seeking more diverse applicant pools, according to new research.
The study, by Tufts University economist Laura Gee, Ph.D., found that female candidates were especially more likely to apply for positions when information about the current number of applicants was advertised. Gee suggests that this could help "ameliorate the gender occupation gap," newswise.com reports.
LinkedIn ran the test over the course of 16 days in March 2012. Gee later analyzed the anonymized dataset, which represented 2.3 million registered users in 235 countries or areas. During the experiment, job seekers viewed a total of 100,000 job postings from 23,000 companies.
The research determined that telling potential applicants how many other people had applied for the position raised the likelihood of application by between 1.9 and 3.6 percent, which represented a potential increase of 1,500 started applications each day.
Not only did the number of women who applied for jobs increase, the number of women who applied for "masculine jobs" also rose. Gee's analysis defines "masculine jobs" as advertised positions for which more than 80 percent of those who started or finished an application were men.
LinkedIn does not collect gender data on members, so LinkedIn's inferred gender data was used for this study.
"Firms often talk about their desires to hire more diverse workforces, especially more women, to decrease the gender occupation gap," notes Gee, an assistant professor in the Department of Economics in the School of Arts and Sciences at Tufts. "Adding this small bit of information helps companies attract more applicants, which could increase the number of applicants from more diverse backgrounds. That could help a company begin to close diversity gaps."
After LinkedIn concluded its experiment, the company added a variety of additional job insights for members to offer context on the popularity of job listings, including signals based on their existing social network connections. 



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