Vacancies and Hirings: Preliminary Evidence from a Survey on Italian Employers

In this paper we seek to enrich our understanding of the connection between job vacancies and hirings, using a recent experimental survey carried out on a small set of Italian employers. We study some basic facts on friction in job matching that are still unknown, in particular the fractions of hirings which occur without benefit of a prior job vacancy and of vacancies cancelled without being followed by a hiring. We develop an enlarged set of measures of friction including also the proportion of non-instantaneous hirings and the job vacancy duration. The results obtained begin uncovering the above facts and can be regarded as an initial step for other surveys, and then for further developments of job search and matching models. We also deal with some of the main issues arising in the measurement of the job vacancy variable, such as the distinction between point-in-time stocks and flows of vacancies, job openings and unfilled jobs and the possible recruiting practices difficult to be captured by the current job vacancy surveys, providing preliminary evidence also about these facts.