Population Research Discovery Seminars
Improving Hiring Decisions: Experimental Evidence on the Value of Reference Information About Teacher Applicants
Dan Goldhaber, Director, CALDER at the American Institutes for Research & CEDR at the University of Washington
Parrington Hall Room 360
To Join By Zoom: Register HERE
04/03/2026
12:30-1:30 PM PT
360 Parrington Hall
Co-Sponsor(s):
Professional references are widely used in hiring decisions, yet their effectiveness remains largely understudied. We analyze structured ratings collected from the professional references of teacher applicants and conduct an experiment to see whether the ratings influence hiring managers’ assessments of applicants and hiring decisions. We find little evidence that providing reference ratings to hiring managers influences their evaluations of candidates or hiring choices in productive ways. Importantly, we also find that reference ratings are predictive of future job performance. The result is a paradox: reference ratings offer potentially low-cost, high-value information, but hiring managers do not appear to make productive use of them.
Dr. Dan Goldhaber is the Director of the Center for Education Data & Research (CEDR, cedr.us) at the University of Washington and the Director of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER, caldercenter.org) at the American Institutes for Research. Both CEDR and CALDER use administrative data to do research that informs decisions about policy and practice.