We use a rich new body of data on the experiences of unemployed job-seekers to determine the sources of wage dispersion and to create a search model consistent with the acceptance decisions the job-seekers made. From the data and the model, we identify the distributions of four key variables: offered wages, offered non-wage job values, the value of the job-seeker's non-work alternative, and the job-seeker's personal productivity. We resolve the tension between the fairly high dispersion of the values job- seekers assign to their job offers which suggest a high value to sampling from multiple offers and the fact that the job-seekers often accept the first offer they receive. An influential recent paper by Hornstein, Krusell, and Violante called attention to this tension. Our resolution rests on the job-ladder model, where unemployed job-seekers accept an offer that beats their non-work value, possibly as an interim job, because they continue to seek jobs while working.