#510 2019 · BRAC Uganda (Erika Deserranno recruitment field experiment) · NGO / community health worker recruitment

An NGO recruited better village health workers by advertising the job as lower-paying, not higher

问题

A brand-new frontline role draws eager applicants you cannot vet for who will actually show up and do the unpaid parts

背景

In 2012 the NGO BRAC began hiring Community Health Promoters for a brand-new position in rural Ugandan villages, combining unpaid door-to-door health education and natal checks with a paid, commission-based sideline selling health products. Because the job and the organization were both new to these villages, candidates had no way to independently judge how much of the work was community service and how much was sales, or what a typical worker actually earned — the position's true nature was invisible from outside.

The standard fix for hiring when motivation cannot be observed is to screen harder after applicants show up: interviews, references, trial periods. All of that is expensive per candidate and easy for a motivated impostor to perform through, especially in a one-off village hiring round with no track record to check. BRAC needed the sorting to happen before the interview, inside the applicant pool itself.

换别人会怎么做

Advertise the best pay you can afford to draw the widest, most competitive applicant pool, then screen for motivation afterward with interviews and trial periods. It fails here because the job's true nature — how much is community service versus paid sales — is invisible to a first-time applicant, so a bigger pool is not a better-informed one, and a post-hoc interview cannot reliably distinguish a genuinely motivated candidate from one who has simply learned to sound like one.

他们看到了什么

In a job whose real content applicants cannot yet observe, the number printed in the ad is not neutral information about pay — it is the applicant's only clue about what the job actually is. A high number reads as 'this is mostly a sales job'; a low number reads as 'this is mostly service.' Candidates then self-select toward the interpretation that fits them, before anyone interviews anyone.

那一手

Economist Erika Deserranno, working inside BRAC's real recruitment campaign across roughly 300 rural communities, randomized what the job ad told candidates about pay — quoting the maximum, average, or minimum of existing workers' true earnings — so otherwise-identical villages saw the same job advertised as high-, medium-, or low-paying. Nothing about the job itself changed; only the number in the flyer did.

为什么管用

Raising the advertised pay does two things at once: it widens the pool by attracting anyone chasing income, and it signals a business-heavy job, which specifically discourages the prosocially motivated from applying — precisely the trait BRAC could not test for directly. Lowering the advertised figure reverses both effects: fewer income-chasers apply, and the signal now reads as service work, drawing candidates whose prior behavior (volunteering, generosity in the donation game) already marked them as intrinsically motivated. Because that motivation is what predicts staying on the job and doing the unpaid parts well, the low-pay ad ends up recruiting a smaller but structurally better-matched pool without BRAC spending a shilling more on screening.

值了多少

Candidates who saw the high-pay version inferred the job was mostly commission sales and less about community health, and were measurably less likely to have prior volunteer experience or to give generously in a follow-up donation game — both markers of prosocial motivation. Two years later, 27% of hired promoters had quit; a one-standard-deviation rise in that donation-game generosity measure predicted an 8-percentage-point lower dropout rate, and prior volunteer experience predicted an 11-point lower dropout rate. Workers recruited under the low-pay framing visited more households, delivered more natal checks, and were more likely to reach the most vulnerable families — while the high-pay framing did fill vacancies faster and pull in a larger raw applicant pool.

什么时候会失灵

The mechanism needs real information asymmetry — a genuinely new role or employer the candidate cannot otherwise research; advertise low pay for a well-understood job and you simply shrink the pool without changing its composition. It also needs a real prosocial-versus-mercenary split in the labor market to sort along, and needs the organization to be able to survive a smaller applicant pool and slower fill rate, which is the price paid for a better-matched one. Push the signal too far and the role becomes unviable to live on, driving away exactly the motivated candidates who still need to eat.

后来呢

Published as "Financial Incentives as Signals: Experimental Evidence from the Recruitment of Village Promoters in Uganda" (American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 2019), the paper won the UniCredit Best Paper Award and the John Hicks Prize for Outstanding Dissertation, and became a standard citation in personnel economics on how wage framing itself functions as a selection device, not just a recruiting cost.

资料来源

[1]Financial Incentives as Signals: Experimental Evidence from the Recruitment of Village Promoters in UgandaAmerican Economic Journal: Applied Economics (American Economic Association), 2019aeaweb.org
[2]Does higher pay attract better applicants? Evidence from a Ugandan NGOWorld Bank Blogs (Development Impact), 2014blogs.worldbank.org