Earnings Announcements and Job Postings
How firms reallocate recruitment before negative earnings announcements, and what that timing reveals about labor-market frictions and capital-market interpretation.
We study whether firms adjust recruitment before releasing negative earnings news. Using U.S. online job postings, earnings-announcement data, employee-flow records, and capital-market outcomes, we document that firms with negative earnings surprises increase posting activity during the three quarters before the announcement and reduce it afterward. The pattern reflects an intertemporal reallocation of recruitment rather than a persistent expansion in labor demand. Firms that front-load postings subsequently hire more workers and target positions with different skill and seniority requirements, but the behavior is not associated with more favorable market responses or stronger later operating performance. The findings show that anticipated bad news creates labor-market frictions that affect when firms recruit and how they structure vacancies, while public job-posting activity does not provide investors with a simple signal of future firm performance.
Presented at: EAA Doctoral Colloquium (Prague, 2026); UC3M Internal Seminar (Madrid, 2026); XIX International Accounting Research Symposium (Madrid, 2025); Madrid Work & Organization Workshop (Madrid, 2025); Finance and Product Markets: Theory, Evidence, and Measurements (Lugano, 2024); XVIII International Accounting Research Symposium (Madrid, 2024); Accounting Summer Camp – Emerging Researchers Consortium (Bozen–Bolzano, 2024); Accounting for Private Entities & Non-investor Stakeholders (HEC Paris, 2024).
- Earnings announcements
- Job postings
- Hiring timing
- Labor-market frictions
- Capital markets