Fast replies may help job seekers, study finds
Research in Management Science found employers favored quick replies and saw them as a sign of future responsiveness.
By Lucas Ferreira · Science & Environment Writer
3 min read
Job seekers may not gain anything by waiting to answer a prospective employer, according to research published in Management Science. The study found that employers consistently favored faster replies, a result that challenges the common concern that quick responses can look desperate.
The University of California San Diego said the research drew on 11.6 million marketplace interactions as well as experiments with job candidates and service providers. Across those settings, the authors reported no evidence that delaying a reply improved a person’s chance of being hired.
On Amir, a professor at the UC San Diego Rady School of Management and a co-author of the paper, said many people believe that appearing less available can help them. The findings, he said, pointed in the other direction.
Reply speed shaped first impressions
The researchers used data from Fiverr, the freelance marketplace that connects employers with service providers, along with three main experiments involving more than 3,600 participants, according to UC San Diego. They also ran five supplemental studies with an additional 5,000 participants.
In the Fiverr data, the study found that a one-hour delay was tied to a 46% drop in the likelihood of being hired. A delay of one full day was associated with a hiring likelihood reduction of about 90%, the researchers reported.
The authors said the pattern held even when decision-makers had other information available, including ratings and the substance of a response. That suggests reply timing was not treated as a minor detail, but as information employers used when judging a potential hire or service provider.
In the experiments, faster responders made stronger first impressions, according to the study. Participants rated them as warmer, more competent and more likely to be responsive later.
Einav Hart of George Mason University, a co-author, said people appear to read a fast reply as a sign that the person will pay attention to their needs in future interactions. The researchers concluded that response speed can act as a signal about what someone may be like to work with.
Fast alone was not enough
The study also found a gap between what people said they cared about and how they acted, according to UC San Diego. Participants said same-day replies would be acceptable, yet when they made hiring decisions, they tended to choose much faster responders.
The researchers cautioned that the findings should not be reduced to a rule that the fastest possible response is best in every situation. Amir said speed matters because people use it as information, while adding that responsiveness and speed are not the same thing.
The authors reported that recipients also cared whether a response seemed personal and attentive. That distinction may carry more weight as AI tools make instant replies easier to produce, according to UC San Diego.
In the experiments, quick replies became less appealing when recipients thought they had been generated automatically or by AI, the researchers found. The practical conclusion, according to the study, is that making someone wait offered little advantage after they reached out, while a prompt response worked best when it also felt genuine.
The paper, titled “Speed Is a Signal: When Faster Replies Increase Hiring Likelihood,” was written by Hart, Amir, Eric VanEpps of Vanderbilt University and Ovul Sezer of Cornell University.
This story draws on original reporting from Phys.org.