Employment in high-value agro-export sectors has been recognized to entail the potential to contribute to poverty reduction in rural areas of developing countries. Concerns have yet been raised about the quality of the created employment and worker preferences have often been overlooked in the literature. We use a discrete choice experiment, in which we relate stated and revealed employment preference of agro-industrial export workers in Peru. We explain employment (mis)matches as a function of personal and employer characteristics. Results suggest that employment preferences are heterogeneous, but that labor market frictions are smaller than what is commonly expected in developing country contexts.