tween occupations? This paper hopes to shed light on these questions using data from the domestic worker, nanny, and general work sector in South Africa.

# **3 Data**

I collect data on job seekers that use the website www.gumtree.co.za, South Africa’s most widely used website for classified job advertisements.<sup>12</sup> Gumtree allows job seekers to post ‘job wanted’ advertisements for free in sectors ranging from housekeeping to engineering.<sup>13</sup> People specify the suburb where they search for employment, include a text with information about themselves, provide their home address and the position they are looking for and may upload a picture. Employers can either post ‘job offered’ advertisements or search for people by sector, region and suburb. Search results provide a list of matched profiles that include a truncated version of the text (see Figure 1). By clicking on the truncated profile of a job seeker, the employer is directed to the individual profile site that contains the full text and contact information. The profile page also has information on the number of people that previously visited this site which will serve as the main outcome variable of interest in the analysis of employer demand.

I collect advertisements posted by job seekers in the housekeeping, general work, and nanny sector between October 2012 and January 2013 in the Cape Town region.<sup>14</sup> Data were captured twice a day for all job seeker ads posted 12 to 24 hours before to alleviate potential selection problems as profiles of people successfully hired may be taken off the website.<sup>15</sup> I collect all posted information, the time of the posting and number of visits for more than 5,400 advertisements. I use only the text visible to employers on the _search result_ site to encode characteristics provided by the job seeker including nationality, age and gender as well as qualification information such as whether the person has job experience or certificates, holds a driver’s license, and is willing to live in the employer’s

> 12Over all provinces, Gumtree has more than 30,000 advertisements posted by employers. Comparable numbers for the next most popular online sites and newspapers are 9,000 by Job mail, 1,000 by Career junction, and 14,000 by JunkMail.

> 13Gumtree also gives the option to pay for priority advertisements that are posted at the top of the search results. These advertisements are excluded from the analysis as this service is mainly used by agencies that act as brokers.

> 14I focus on Cape Town as it is the region most highly on the job website. Other cities and more rural areas are unsuitable for this analysis as they have a much lower frequency of advertisement postings.

> 15Job seekers have the option of re-posting an advertisement once a month. This may potentially bias results as employers may not click on a profile that they recognize from a previous search. In practice, less than 5% of the profiles are re-posted using the identical advertisement and I exclude these from the analysis. More frequently, job seekers post the same profile in a different suburb. This is less of a problem since employers are likely only looking for people searching in their specific suburb.

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