# **1. Introduction**

Do socioemotional skill signals in CVs play a role in employers’ hiring decisions? A vast literature shows the importance of socioemotional skills in labor market outcomes in the form of earnings or employment, but whether signals of these skills matter in getting hired remains unanswered. Suppose that a young graduate is looking for a job and comes across a vacancy ad with a requirement of, say, teamwork skills, listed alongside other requirements, such as certain levels of education and experience. Should she include a signal demonstrating she has strong teamwork skills, along with her academic degrees and the jobs she worked at? Furthermore, would such a signal have the same effect in terms of advancing the candidate in the recruitment process if that candidate is male? This study seeks to provide answers to these questions.

Economics literature has firmly established that socioemotional skills are valuable in the labor market. Numerous studies demonstrate that possession of socioemotional skills has a positive impact on lifetime earnings (e.g., Cameron and Heckman, 1993; Heckman and Rubinstein, 2001; Bowles et al., 2001a,b; Heckman et al., 2006; Cunha et al., 2006; Cunha and Heckman, 2008). It is also quite common to see socioemotional skills requirements in vacancy ads, and online job search websites recommend job seekers to include some aspect of socioemotional skills in their CVs.

However, little is known about whether including socioemotional skill signals in CVs would help in securing a job interview. Evidence from the literature is scarce and indirect (e.g., the effect of volunteering activities as studied in Baert and Vujijic, 2018 and the effect of sport skills as studied in Rooth, 2011). Piopiunik et al. (2018) is among the first studies to provide evidence that socioemotional skills may matter for employers when they evaluate candidates, although the evidence is collected using an unincentivized survey with hypothetical CVs. Even if employers would consider socioemotional skills during hiring, it remains unclear whether employers can get the relevant information on the candidate's socioemotional skills. While they can rely on educational attainment or technical certifications of prospective workers as signals of cognitive and technical skills, socioemotional skills are more difficult for employers to assess and for job seekers to signal. Furthermore, if socioemotional skill signals are not credible, they might hurt the applicant’s chances as they can be perceived by the employer as an attempt to oversell oneself.

The above complications are in part due to the vagueness in the definition of, and the difficulty in measuring, socioemotional skills. There is still no consensus on the definition or even the term: “soft skills", “personality traits", “non-cognitive skills", “non-cognitive abilities", “character", and “socioemotional skills" are all used to identify the personality attributes (Heckman and Kautz, 2012). In practice, the investigation of certain socioemotional skills in the literature depends heavily on data availability (Brunello and Schlotter, 2011). Perhaps the most used measure of socioemotional skills is the Big Five personality traits, and many studies find them important in career success (e.g., Boudreau et al., 2001; Seibert, Scott E. and Kraimer, Maria L., 2001; Gelissen and de Graaf, 2006) and earnings (e.g., Nyhus and Pons, 2005; Mueller and Plug, 2006; Heineck and Anger, 2010). However, the Big Five traits are too general to signal in a CV and some are not clearly applicable to the work context, so employers may not find such signals valuable or credible.

Furthermore, employers may value similar socioemotional skill signals of male and female candidates differently. This may be particularly important considering that women experience higher rates of 2