Complementarity of Required Skills and their Mastering Impact in Vacancies without Work Experience Requirement

Abstract

The paper identifies the factors impacting the entry-level salary offered in Moscow, Russia, to job seekers with no work experience. To identify the factors potentially impacting the entry-level salary, a frequency analysis of text descriptions of job vacancies posted at the online recruitment platform HeadHunter was conducted. In addition to assessing the direct impact of skills, their complementarity was identified. Hard skills have a positive impact on the entry-level salary, while soft skills have a predominantly indirect impact through enhancing the impact of hard skills. The paper fills a lack of research allowing to justify the choice of skills and their combinations to learn. It has been shown that the skills that are more rarely listed in job advertisements tend to pay off faster. Although the main findings come from the total sample, both the impact of skills and their pay-off are heterogeneous across occupations, so the authors conducted a separate analysis for a subsample of analysts. The resulting more specific findings suggest that further research by occupation is worth pursuing.