job postings reduce information costs and unemployment rates and improve job match quality in developed countries (Beard et al., 2012; Kuhn and Mansour, 2014; Mang, 2012). Third, online job portal data, particularly the data from Rozee.pk, are relevant to specific challenges in Pakistani labor markets. The youth, especially well-educated young people, suffer a higher unemployment rate, and wage employment needs to increase. The country faces a gender disparity in labor force participation (LFP).<sup>8</sup> The data from Rozee.pk are suitable to analyze these challenges because the online job portal is mostly used by well-educated young people for wage jobs, and many job postings are gender earmarked.

# 2. Online job portal data from Rozee.pk

Rozee.pk, founded in 2007, is a leading online job portal in Pakistan. This paper analyzes a data set consisting of 5.0 million jobseekers and 108,000 registered employers corresponding to 412,000 jobs posted on the platform. The data provided by Rozee.pk to the study team consist of four types of data sets: jobseekers, employers, job postings, and transactions.<sup>9</sup> The data set of jobseekers is based on their resumes created at Rozee.pk and includes rich information about demography, education, professional experience, skills possessed, and current and desired salaries. The employer data set is based on employers’ profiles at Rozee.pk. The job posting data set is an archive of all job postings and has virtually all information included in job postings, such as job titles, job descriptions, qualifications, and salary ranges. The transaction data set is a record of all applications as to who applied for which job postings on what date and time, and whose applications were viewed by employers. Information about application results, such as who was shortlisted, is also available, although this information is incomplete since application results are voluntarily updated by employers. This paper mainly uses the data period from 2012 to 2019 for the analyses, unless otherwise specified.

## 2.1 Description of the labor market domain represented by the data

One of the limitations of using online job portal data is that the data may not be representative of the entire labor market.<sup>10</sup> Geographically, the jobseekers, employers, and job postings on Rozee.pk are concentrated in megacities, as illustrated in Figure 1. We categorize Lahore, Karachi, and Islamabad/Rawalpindi as first-tier cities; and Faisalabad, Gujranwala, Hyderabad, Multan, Peshawar, and Quetta as second-tier cities. Concentrations are observed in first-tier cities—Lahore, Karachi, and Islamabad/Rawalpindi—where 48% of the jobseekers, 79% of the employers, and 87% of the job postings are found. The second-tier cities—Faisalabad, Gujranwala, Hyderabad, Multan, Peshawar, and Quetta—constitute only 12% of the jobseekers, 8% of the employers, and 11% of the job postings. Many jobseekers in small cities also use the portal, as the proportion of jobseekers in the other domestic areas is 24%, whereas the proportion of job postings there is only 9%. This off-balanced ratio between jobseekers and job postings in the other domestic areas may mean that there are not enough job opportunities in these areas and

> 8 Only one in four women participate in the labor force while 82% of men do so (Amir et al.; 2018).

> 9 The data shared by Rozee.pk for this research were completely anonymized for the protection of the user privacy. 10 See Carnevale et al. (2014), Kureková et al. (2015) and Nomura et al. (2017).

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