The Challenge

Firms in many labor markets in low- and middle-income countries struggle to fill vacancies despite high levels of job search activity.¹ A central explanation points to challenges on both sides of the market: Employers receive many poorly matched applications and lack credible information about applicants' soft skill attributes like teamwork, creativity, and communication.² At the same time, jobseekers often apply broadly without reliable ways to signal their fit for a given position. This is especially pronounced for soft skills, which are difficult to measure, verify, and communicate in a standardized way.

Existing research suggests that soft skill certification programs have shown promising results in raising employment and earnings among participants at relatively limited cost.³ However, little evidence exists about their effects on workers who do not participate in these programs. If participants in certification programs find work largely at the expense of similar jobseekers who do not take part, the net impact on vacancy-filling rates and overall employment may be limited.

The Program

The certification intervention provides jobseekers with a standardized, verifiable signal of their soft skills to employers. Jobseekers attend an in-person screening session where they complete psychometric tests and behavioral tasks measuring a range of soft skills, including personal initiative, executive function, self-efficacy, personality traits, growth mindset, grit, and social cognition. Results are reported in certificates using relative performance bands rather than absolute scores, which jobseekers may present to prospective employers at their discretion.

In addition to certification, jobseekers receive job-matching support through recommendations to apply to a set of vacancies, and vacancies receive a corresponding pool of recommended applicants. These recommendations are generated using scores of match quality derived from initial preferences of both recruiters and jobseekers.

The Evaluation

Researchers are conducting a randomized evaluation to measure whether the soft skill certification program can increase job vacancy-filling rates and overall employment in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The study involves 2,500 jobseekers and 1,250 vacancies, drawn from four selected occupations: human resources managers, accountants, secretaries, and marketing officers. Vacancies and jobseekers are randomly assigned to one of three groups:

• Matching only: Jobseekers receive application recommendations to vacancies in the same arm, based on predicted match quality.
• Matching plus certification: Jobseekers receive both application recommendations and standardized soft skill certificates, which they are encouraged to share with employers.
• Comparison: No intervention is offered to vacancies or jobseekers.

Researchers will measure whether vacancies were filled and at what wage, and whether jobseekers who were part of either group are more likely to be employed. They will also use the results in combination with empirical analysis based on economic models to estimate the degree to which screening frictions reduce employment in this market, and how much certification can reduce these frictions.

Results

Results will be available in 2027.

Sources

^1. International Labor Office. Skills and Jobs Mismatches in Low-and Middle-Income Countries. International Labor Organization (ILO), 2019.

^2. Caria, Sara, and Jorge Yepez. "The intersection between traditional roles and a fragmented labor market: a propensity score matching analysis of gender wage gap in Ecuador." Journal of Economic Studies 52, no. 4 (2025): 633-654

^3. Kreft, Brynde, Information, Skills and Job Search: A Bayesian Hierarchical Analysis of the Impacts of Reducing Information Frictions for Unskilled Jobseekers in Developing Countries (2025). Available at SSRN: https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5839252