Measuring employers’ demand for personality traits in job ads

Abstract

We propose measures of employers’ demands for personality traits from job ads based on employers’ use of trait-descriptive terms from the psychology literature on personality. Identifying personality demands in job ads requires addressing challenges such as the prevalence of false positives. We demonstrate that as many as half of all instances of trait descriptive terms in job ads are false positives in the sense that they do not refer to workers’ personalities. The presence of false negatives is less problematic. After eliminating false positives, we validate that our measures capture employers’ demand for personality traits by showing that, at the occupation level, our measures are correlated with the traits of individuals in those occupations for all traits except emotional stability. In our sample of job ads, personality trait demands are as prevalent as requirements for educational attainment and work experience. Consistent with evidence on the importance of social skills in the labor market, extroversion is the trait most sought by employers, but a substantial fraction of ads also indicate demand for conscientiousness, openness, and agreeableness.