Description/Abstract
With the constant deluge of listservs, email advertisements, and phishing scams, many email recipients have become accustomed to deleting emails from unknown sources without ever reading them. Knowing what can increase the likelihood of email engagement may improve the effectiveness of email communications in job recruitment. This brief summarizes findings from a study that reports results from a randomized controlled trial (RCT) of a mass email campaign to recruit applicants for a training program for K-12 teaching jobs. The authors compared email open rates between emails that contained a letter with university logos signed by a university official versus emails that contained an informational flyer with a photograph. They found that emails presented in an official letter form increased email open rates by 15%.
Document Type
Policy Brief
Date
4-30-2025
Keywords
Salience, email recruitment, underrepresented groups
Language
English
Series
Policy Briefs Series
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to Ben and Marcia Baldanza for the funding for this field experiment. The authors thank Alyssa Kirk and Shannon Monnat for edits on a previous version of this brief.
Disciplines
Behavioral Economics | Public Affairs, Public Policy and Public Administration | Public Policy
Recommended Citation
Lopoo, Leonard M., Bifulco, Robert, Patnaik, Hannah, Haque, Ashraf, Ashby, Christine, and Theoharis, George. (2025). How Can Public Sector Employers Improve the Effectiveness of Email Recruitment? Center for Policy Research. Policy Brief #18. Accessed at: https://doi.org/10.14305/rt.cpr.2025.2.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
