The Brink: Looking for Jobs on Indeed or LinkedIn? BU Research Finds It’s Best to Apply Early
Excerpt from The Brink | By: Abigail Pritchard | July 24, 2025 | Photo: Unsplash
Digital platforms like LinkedIn and Indeed have transformed the job search. For recent graduates (and anyone else) looking for work, these sites are a lifeline.
But for Andrey Fradkin, a Boston University Questrom School of Business associate professor of marketing, these platforms aren’t just useful tools—they’re also goldmines of data on how people navigate key decisions.
Fradkin recently published a study on how we use online job boards, and how small details on position listings can impact decisions to apply. He found that the longer a job is posted, the fewer people apply after the first few days. He also discovered that when people learn that few others have applied for a job, they are more likely to apply. The results were published in Management Science.
Formerly a data scientist for Airbnb, Fradkin thinks of himself as a connoisseur of online platforms—”whenever I see a new one, I try to learn about it and what the rules are,” he says—and his research uses his knowledge and data from the sites themselves to explore how they work and how to get more out of them.
“As economists, we’re very interested in how to market, how to organize markets to solve people’s problems,” says Fradkin, a dean’s research scholar who’s affiliated with BU’s economics department. “[Digital platforms] allow us to measure human behavior in a way that wasn’t possible before. Because everything on a digital platform is instrumented, we can see how people are searching, how people are communicating, what transactions happen.”