Despite Egypt’s high youth unemployment rate, employers across all sectors struggle to recruit workers to fill their vacancies. In response, the Egyptian Network for Employment Promotion (NEP) was created to connect young job seekers with vacancies in the blue-collar sector. Job seekers are provided with the opportunity for three rounds of nominations for job interviews. One major challenge that the NEP faced, however, was a high drop-off rate. Many job seekers (78%) were nominated for at least one job that matched their interests. However, being nominated does not equate to being placed. Data showed that those who were nominated for a job but not placed in the first round often dropped off. Only 13% of those nominated but not placed in round one persisted to a second round, and this figure is even lower for persistence to third round. Very few unplaced jobseekers make it through all three rounds they are eligible for.

ideas42 worked with the NEP to identify what may be preventing job seekers from persisting in the program. This behavioral diagnosis uncovered that (1) they may weigh the immediate costs of starting a job higher than the long-term benefits, (2) negative self-perceptions can deter them from persisting, (3) negative experiences in their first nomination may discourage persistence to an additional nomination, and (4) jobseekers often join the program with the perception that the job they obtain will be their ideal job (e.g., it will be in the sector they want, with a good salary, flexible hours, and close to home), and when they realize they may have to compromise, they drop out of the program.

ideas42 partnered with the NEP’s Cairo employment center to assign job seekers who enrolled for their program during the study period into either a control group that received none of the designs or a treatment group that received the behavioral designs (detailed below). This package of behavioral designs aimed to help job seekers identify their skills, build confidence, and prepare for job interviews. Job seekers in the treatment group received each of the below designs during their first meeting with their assigned NEP staff member.

Table 1:  NEP Behavioral Designs

Figure 1: Informal vs. Formal Job Sector Comparison Graph

Figure 2: Job Interview Checklist

Figure 3: NEP Road to Discovery

In a randomized evaluation, job seekers who received the suite of designs were significantly more likely to persist to multiple job nomination rounds in the NEP compared to similar job seekers who did not receive the designs, by 25 percentage points on average (p < 0.05), a 192% increase in persistence when controlling for other factors.

The intervention also saw a positive, but only marginally significant (p < 0.10), effect of actual job seeker placement in jobs for those who received the designs. However, we hypothesize that this may be due to the short duration of the testing period. The job search process can take a long time, so it is possible that a longer period of testing would have yielded even greater positive results.

Figure 4: Persistence of job seekers: The persistence rate for job seekers who received the behavioral designs is significantly different from the control group (p < 0.05).

Inspired to implement this design in your own work? Here are some things to think about before you get started:

• Are the behavioral drivers to the problem you are trying to solve similar to the ones described in the challenge section of this project?
• Is it feasible to adapt the design to address your problem?
• Could there be structural barriers at play that might keep the design from having the desired effect?
• Finally, we encourage you to make sure you monitor, test and take steps to iterate on designs often when either adapting them to a new context or scaling up to make sure they’re effective.

Additionally, consider the following insights from the design’s researcher:

• In this intervention, one key aspect of the designs was to assist job seekers, who often had little to no formal job experience, in identifying skills they have that could be highlighted during a job interview. Many of the job seekers struggled initially to see that they already possessed skills that could be beneficial in a formal job. As a result, we found it imperative to focus on directing their thinking toward skills that could be gained in different aspects of their lives independent of a job (e.g., sports, hobbies, personal relationships) and how those could be transferred to the formal job setting.
• The designs should include colloquial text in the language of the recipients. This is especially true if you’re working with populations where illiteracy is a concern, in which case place a greater focus on using images rather than text.
• Though we delivered all three designs to job seekers at one time (during their first interview with their assigned employment officer), future interventions should consider whether there are opportunities to stagger the delivery of their designs. This could reduce the workload of the person tasked with delivering the designs and reduce the risk of the job seeker losing interest or becoming distracted while key information is being explained to them.