A cloud's silver lining? The impact of policy interventions on new and maturing technology ventures' online recruitment

Research summary

We synthesize the external enablement (EE) framework with insights from labor economics and strategic human capital to theorize how restrictive policy interventions shape technology ventures' employee recruitment, attending to both sides of the hiring dyad. We engage in a quantitative study of over 220,000 recruiting interactions between technology ventures and candidates on a prominent digital networking platform surrounding the early COVID-19 pandemic policy responses. We find that firms' recruitment declined significantly while candidates' responsiveness increased during the early COVID-19 policy interventions. In turn, young technology ventures were enabled to hire more during the interventions, whereas maturing ventures were enabled to hire differently—acquiring candidates with greater entrepreneurial orientation. Our work extends the EE framework to human resource strategies and to heterogeneous enablement across firm age.

Managerial summary

Hiring is a critical task for young and maturing venture firms, and environmental disruptions can impinge heavily on recruiting processes. We study how restrictive policy interventions shape technology ventures' employee recruitment. Examining over 220,000 recruiting interactions on a major digital platform before and during the early COVID-19 policy responses, we find that restrictive policy interventions alter the technology venture labor market, deterring some firms from recruiting while making others more successful in their continued hiring efforts. Furthermore, we discover that maturing firms are more adaptive than young firms in their selection of candidates during policy interventions—seeking employees with more entrepreneurial characteristics.

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