'Your Duties Are To Sweep A Floor Remotely': Low Information Quality in Job Advertisements is a Barrier to Low-Income Job-Seekers' Successful Use of Digital Platforms
Sara Kingsley, Michael Six Silberman, Clara Wang, Robert Lambeth, Jiayin Zhi, Motahhare Eslami, Beibei Li, Jeffrey Bigham · 2024 · Proceedings of the 3rd Annual Meeting of the Symposium on Human-Computer Interaction for Work (CHIWORK) · doi:10.1145/3663384.3663403
Summary
This paper investigates barriers that low-income job-seekers face when using digital platforms to find work, based on 27 semi-structured interviews with US residents earning under $45,000 who had searched for paid work in the previous two years. The participants — 30% of whom identified as disabled — used a wide range of platforms including Indeed, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, crowd work platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk, and gig work platforms like Uber and DoorDash. The central finding is that low information quality in job advertisements is a major, previously underexplored barrier to successful digital job search. Low quality ads took multiple forms: ads missing critical information such as pay, location, hours, or job requirements; ads that were later discovered to be misleading about the actual job; ads with unnecessary and discriminatorily dissuasive requirements (such as physical lifting requirements for desk jobs, which specifically deterred disabled applicants); ads for unethical or illegal work; and ads that were outright scams designed to harvest personal data or extract free labour. The authors develop a first empirical taxonomy of low information quality job ad characteristics, classifying them across dimensions such as ambiguous, incomplete, absent, outdated, contradictory, biased, privacy-invasive, and inappropriate.
Key findings
Job-seekers developed heuristics to navigate low quality ads — for example, avoiding ads with implausibly wide pay ranges or commission-based pay — but these heuristics produced both false positives (avoiding legitimate jobs) and false negatives (engaging with scam ads), sometimes making their job search less effective. Some job-seekers changed their overall search strategies in response, including "spamming" applications broadly, shifting to smaller niche platforms, or relying on local in-person networks, all with mixed results. Persistently encountering low quality ads eroded trust in both employers and platforms. Strikingly, job-seekers reported applying to hundreds or thousands of positions with minimal responses, directly contradicting prevalent media narratives during 2019-2022 that employers were desperately seeking workers and unemployed people were choosing not to work. At least two disabled interviewees reported being specifically deterred by unnecessary physical requirements in job ads for jobs they could otherwise perform, which they identified as ableist discrimination. The paper makes the important conceptual contribution that the problem lies primarily with employers and platforms, not with job-seekers — a shift from most prior HCI research that focused on training or tools for job-seekers.
Relevance
While not a traditional accessibility paper, this research has significant implications for disability and digital inclusion. The finding that job ads include unnecessary physical requirements that deter disabled applicants is a concrete example of how digital platforms can perpetuate employment discrimination. The 30% disability rate among participants highlights that disabled people are disproportionately represented among low-income job-seekers, making platform accessibility and information quality a disability issue. The paper's recommendations — that employers avoid posting requirements not truly necessary for the job, that platforms verify employer identities, and that policymakers consider regulatory intervention — are directly relevant to disability employment advocacy. The taxonomy of low information quality ads could inform the development of automated tools to flag potentially discriminatory or misleading job postings. More broadly, the paper contributes to understanding how digital platforms can either reduce or reinforce barriers to employment for marginalized groups including people with disabilities.
Tags: digital inclusion · digital divide · employment · disability employment · low-income users · platform governance · information quality · social justice · digital literacy