While conventional wisdom suggests that that getting jobs is more about “who you know” than “what you know”, the empirical evidence on job searching shows that people who rely on their personal contacts when searching for a job generally do not receive any benefits over people who use more formal job search methods. Since the most advantaged social groups are the least likely to use personal contacts when job searching, some have questioned the importance of social capital in determining job outcomes. Unfortunately, the recent critiques have only focused on active job searchers, ignoring the many workers who get their jobs without searching. Generally, these non-searchers change jobs after receiving unsolicited job information and offers through routine personal exchanges. As such, non-searchers constitute an important if overlooked segment of informal activity in the labor market.
I analyze data from the 1979 cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to examine the patterns and payoffs to non-searching across the work career. I identify three main types of non-searching—entry-level, reentry-level, and elite—among employed workers both early in their work careers (age 17-25) and in the early prime of their careers (age 33-41). Entry-
level non-searching occurs early in the career among people who are often students that are accessing their first few jobs. Reentry-level non-searching occurs later in the career primarily among women transitioning back into the workforce after taking time off to take care of family responsibilities. Elite non-searching occurs mainly among men in the prime of their careers who have the most work experience. Non-searchers vary substantially in their personal and job characteristics, with the bulk of the benefits to non-searching going to elite non-searchers. These elite non-searchers are recruited from some of the best jobs around and are more likely than active searchers to receive high wage managerial jobs with a great deal of authority and prestige. These findings re-assert the importance of social capital in determining labor market outcomes, suggesting that future research needs to account for non-searchers in order to assess the full extent of informal job matching and embeddedness in the labor market.
