Even careful managers and bosses, the ones who check references and conduct probing interviews, will never know as much as about a job candidate as that person does.
It's a version of the asymmetric information problem, which crops up all the time when people buy or sell things. One side of a deal just knows a whole lot more than the other.
What's not nearly as well understood in the job market is that job-seekers have tough information problems, too. The labor economist Aaron Sojourner of the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management has long focused on these kinds of problems.
His most recent research paper, just out, focused on a narrow question of loosening the rules around employee nondisclosure agreements. With his two co-authors, he explained how this information problem costs workers a lot. And you have to wonder if these NDAs really only benefit bad employers.
The problem of workers haven't gotten nearly the attention that's been paid to the boss's information problem, Sojourner said.
The stakes are really high, too, Sojourner said. Making an unlucky job change is not like choosing a bad restaurant for lunch, over in an hour. A job is the biggest economic factor in the lives of most people, paying the bills and providing benefits such as employer-subsidized health insurance.
Workers afraid of the unknown will even put off looking for a new job, no matter how ready they are for a new assignment or eager for higher pay.
Sojourner and his research partners, Jason Sockin of the University of Pennsylvania and Evan Starr of the University of Maryland, turned their attention to online reviews in the labor market because of how common online reviewing has become across our economy. They used Glassdoor in their latest study, as Sockin had worked there for a time and knew the data well.