Telling job seekers that a startup offers lots of autonomy sounds like a strong pitch. In a field experiment with more than 10,000 candidates, it pulled in more people without degrees and pushed away those with graduate degrees, whose interest fell by about a quarter.
The study is by Saerom (Ronnie) Lee of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and Reuben Hurst of the University of Maryland’s Smith School of Business. It was first posted on SSRN on August 7, 2025, and revised in April 2026.
Startups talk about autonomy more and more
The authors first analyzed 150,140,016 US job postings from 3,020,059 firms between 2010 and 2019, linked to Crunchbase data to identify startups. Among established firms, the share of postings using autonomy-related language rose from 14% to 19%. Among startups it rose from 22% to 34%.
Use of the exact word “autonomy” in startup postings more than tripled, from 1.1% to 3.5%. It was most common in high-tech fields such as biotechnology, payments and data, and in postings that required more education.
An email with one extra sentence
Next, the researchers partnered with a US high-tech startup that had just raised Series B funding and was hiring for engineering and sales. Through a startup job platform, they emailed 11,135 qualified job seekers; 10,718 emails were delivered. The experiment was preregistered and launched on June 10, 2025.
Half the emails included a short paragraph, taken from the company’s own careers page, saying autonomy at the firm “isn’t just a buzzword” and promising freedom to shape one’s role. The other half left it out. The main outcome was whether a person clicked through to the application page.
Overall, the autonomy message made no difference to how many people clicked. The effect split by education. Among candidates without a bachelor’s degree, clicks rose by 2.69 percentage points, a 69% increase from a 3.88% baseline. Among graduate degree holders, clicks fell by 2.91 points, a 25% drop from 11.8%.
That changed who showed up. People without a bachelor’s degree made up 11.65% of interested candidates in the control group and 20.28% in the autonomy group. Actual applications from graduate degree holders fell by 1.72 points, or 35%, and the drop was sharpest among people with doctorates.
Too much of a good thing
A follow-up survey experiment suggested the gap was not about who values autonomy. Instead, more educated respondents were more likely to read the message as a warning sign, inferring that the company had too little managerial supervision and weak ways to resolve conflict, which they consider necessary to get work done.
The authors note limits. Education is an imperfect stand-in for candidate quality, and the application page itself mentioned autonomy, so the effect on applications may be understated. The startup was a single firm.
Still, the cost is concrete: one sentence about freedom in a recruiting email cut graduate degree holders’ share of the interested pool while lifting the share of those without a degree by nearly three quarters.
Study Details:
- Title: When Autonomy Backfires: Adverse Selection in Startup Recruitment
- Authors: Saerom (Ronnie) Lee, Reuben Hurst
- Journal: SSRN working paper (Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania)
- Publication Date: August 7, 2025
- DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.5382062