Matchmaking or Information Leakage? Disclosure Benefits and Constraints of Corporate Job Advertisement Specificity

Abstract

This study examines the benefits and constraints of a special form of corporate voluntary disclosure—job advertisements. Using a novel dataset of over 8 million recruiting advertisements posted by public companies, I follow taxonomy theories and create a continuous measure of information specificity, based upon the level of descriptive detail of skill requirements in job advertisements. Consistent with the theory that labor market disclosure mitigates search frictions, I find job advertisement specificity positively predicts employee satisfaction, productivity, and corporate accounting performance and negatively predicts employee turnover rate. My results further suggest that job advertisement specificity provides incremental information about human capital intangibles and improves the value-relevance of accounting numbers. I also show that the information specificity is constrained by product market competition. Together, my results suggest job advertisement is an important voluntary disclosure channel and that the content of job advertisements is informative to capital- and product-market participants.