A Research On The Employment Of College Graduates Based On Search And Matching Theory

With the popularization of higher education in China,the scale of college graduates continues to expand.Due to the lack of sufficient absorption of the labor market,the employment rate of college graduates is on the rise.In 2019,the employment rate of undergraduate graduates is 8.9%,which is the highest in the past five years;the employment rate of higher vocational graduates is8.1%,which is the highest in the past four years.The great pressure of college graduates can be seen from these statistics.In 2020,COVID-19 swept all over the world and caused a great negative impact on the employment of college graduates.It is “the most difficult employment season” in history.Therefore,how to promote the employment of college graduates is an urgent problem to be solved.This paper attempts to analyze the issue of promoting the employment of college graduates from both theoretical and empirical aspects,and tries to give some feasible suggestions.In theory,this paper takes the search and matching theory as the framework to analyze the em-ployment of college graduates from the perspectives of human capital and social network.From the perspective of human capital,combined with Blanchard and diamond’s ”ranking” idea and Spence’s(1978)and Weiss’ s(1995)”signaling theory”,this paper holds that recruitment is an in-vestment of a company in an uncertain environment,and companies prefer candidates with high human capital.This is because in recruitment,the company cannot know the productivity of job seekers,so it needs to observe the individual characteristics of them to decide whether to employ a specific job seeker;at the same time,job seekers also need to send convincing signals to the com-pany to show their productivity,and human capital is undoubtedly the most convincing individual characteristics and signals,so the company prefers job seekers with high human capital.Based on this idea,the company’s recruitment process can be simplified as: many job seekers participate in the company’s recruitment,the company ranks all job seekers’ human capital,and gives priority to the job seekers with higher human capital.In this situation,we derived the matching function and the job acquisition rate function.We find that: in a certain range,the job acquisition rate is increasing with respect to human capital.We verify this conclusion in the empirical part.We measured the human capital of college graduates with educational background,whether a student is a student leader,and other indicators,and find that: compared with undergraduate graduates,masters are more likely to get jobs;compared with college graduates who have not been student leaders,college graduates who have been student leaders are more likely to be employed.From the perspective of social network,this paper believes that it is job information that is transmitted through social networks(can also be generally understood as any help that can pro-mote the employment of college graduates).The same setting was adopted by Calvó-Armengol and Zenou(2005),but they assumed that employment information could only be transmitted in a single step through the social network.Although their model is self-consistent,for the three rea-sons mentioned in the literature review,this paper thinks that their model may not be suitable for describing the employment of college graduates.Therefore,we relaxed their hypothesis that job information can be transmitted in multiple steps through social networks.Following the method used by Yamaguchi(1994),we check the case in which employment information is allowed to be transmitted in multiple steps through social networks,and derive the matching function,job acquisition rate and wage equation.We find that: with the expansion of the size of social net-work,the job acquisition rate increases and the wage increases.In the empirical part,we verify this conclusion.We measure the scale of social network size of college graduates with indicators such as per capita annual income of families.We find that: compared with the college graduates whose family average annual income is less than 50000 RMB,the college graduates whose family average annual income is more than 50000 RMB are more likely to be employed and have higher wages.In order to comprehensively analyze the impact of human capital and social network on the employment of college graduates,this paper also made an interview.From the results of the in-terview,in addition to confirming the previous theoretical and empirical results,we also draw the following three conclusions: first,in terms of human capital,with the improvement of the school level or education background,the help effect of academic performance on the job acquisition rate of college graduates is weakening;second,internship experience is very important for college students to find jobs successfully;third,with the improvment of college students’ human capital,the positive effect of social network or social capital on the employment of college graduates is weakening.Based on the theoretical,empirical and interview results,this paper attempts to put forward some feasible suggestions.As far as human capital is concerned,college students should be to improve their human capital and the key factors are school level,education background,student leadership and internship.Besides,to some extent,the interview shows that: with the improvment of human capital,the positive impact of social network on the employment of college graduates has weakened.In general,our suggestions are: compared with social network,college graduates should pay more attention to the impact of human capital on employment,higher human capital can make college graduates have a greater job accquisition rate,and the key human capital factors can be: school,education background,student leadership and internship.As far as social network is concerned,our measurement results seem to have little practical effect on promoting the employ-ment of college graduates,because college graduates can’t change the annual per capita income of their families before they get jobs and wages.However,combined with the theory of human cap-ital and from a long-term perspective,college graduates can improve their human capital at first,so as to improve the probability of employment.After being employed,college graduates should work hard to accumulate wealth,and their children will benefit from their wealth accumulation when they hunt for jobs.