| Summary: | Digital platforms have become central in job search. Job-seekers’ experiences with these platforms, however, is a relatively new research area. This paper presents findings from 27 interviews with US low-income job-seekers. Job-seekers encountered many job ads with low information quality on the platforms they used in their searches. These included ads where important information, such as job pay, duration, hours, location, or requirements were missing, unclear, contradictory, or misleading; ads for unethical or illegal work; and ads that did not correspond to paying work but were designed to lure job-seekers into performing free labor or into scams. While job-seekers developed heuristics to navigate low quality ads, these did not always work, and may have caused job-seekers to miss relevant job opportunities. This paper helps answer an open question in HCI research about barriers to low-income job-seekers’ successful use of digital platforms: one barrier is low information quality job ads.
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