Search design and online job search – new avenues for applied and experimental research

•Online job search generates new data for micro and macro research.•Interventions in online job search allows for “search design”, which can incorporate lessons from labor economics.•Randomized evaluations will become increasingly easy online.•This paper reviews recent advances along these lines, discusses advantages and drawbacks, and outlines avenues for future research. Online job search opens new avenues to experimentally alter the search process, and to engage in “search design”. It also offers an unprecedented channel to collect data on how job seekers search for jobs and how firms search for employees. This paper discusses the research possibilities that this generates and reviews some of the recent developments in this area.