Every resume should come with a warning label:
Don’t trust your judgment of this person. It’s probably biased.
Study after study shows us that the assessments we make of people based on their resumes are biased. These biases are predictable, and they skew our judgments of job candidates.
Judging personality from resumes? You’re probably wrong.
When people look at resumes, they think that they can assess the general personality of candidates. Except that we can’t. Studies show that we correctly assess someone’s correct personality traits only 20 % of the time, and even then we can get only a few kinds of traits close to right.
We think we’re picking the extrovert, the detail oriented, the get it done guy… but we are not.
Judging the “better candidate” from resumes? You’re probably wrong.
Think that you’ve got good judgment about which candidate is better-qualified? Think again.
Studies have shown us that given two resumes that list identical job experience and qualifications, and differ only in that one has a male name and the other has a female name, more often we will judge the man as being the better candidate.
We pick James over Jane. Then, we offer James a higher salary.
A now famous study demonstrated that, when presented with otherwise identical resumes, except that one has an obviously African American name (e.g., Jamal) and the other a more ambiguous name (e.g., James) we’ll pick James over Jamal.
We’ll also offer James more money.
Both of these streams of resume research show us that we discriminate, unconsciously, when we evaluate resumes. We express a preference for men over women, and we shy away from ‘obviously’ African – American candidates in favor of candidates of ambiguous race.
Judging future career commitment from resume? Surprise — Likely you’re wrong.
A recent resume study has shown that raters prefer a married female candidate who has kept her birth name (not her “maiden name”, please) over the female candidate who has taken her husband’s name.
Why? Think of it as a new kind of marriage penalty – a woman who takes her husband’s name is seen as less committed to her career.
(And, she is seen as having a warmer personality. In other words, if you refuse to take your husband’s name you’re a career oriented, cold-hearted bitch. But you knew that already.)
For the 7% of us married women who keep the names we were born with, this sort of discrimination might be good. While it may not balance out the discrimination for being female, for not being obviously white, for having children, and for not having played football in college, when discrimination works in our favor, why complain? Except that we may care about having an unfair prejudicial advantage over the other 93 – 94% of married women job candidates.
How valid are resume studies?
Resume studies are incredibly useful. Despite being ‘lab studies’ with predictable caveats about how well they apply in ‘real life’, lab studies let researchers control for competing explanations, to single out one particular difference that would be linked to differences in evaluation of a candidate.
Resume studies are also valid in a different way—resume studies mimic pretty well what hiring managers actually do.
Hiring managers sort through resumes making quick judgments about which 5 candidates out of 250 applicants they’re going to interview. And, they establish expectations of these candidates (e.g., how outgoing, how career-oriented, how warm-hearted) and penalize candidates if in reality the candidate differs from expectations (even if the candidate is better than expected).
Why does it matter?
A BBA student asked me a few weeks ago how we should make sense out of all these studies of gender- and rae-based pay discrimination. Where does it start? She wanted to know, I think, because she wants to figure out where to focus efforts for change.
Think about the estimated difference in pay estimated in this study. The Dutch researchers who conducted the married last name study determined that a woman who changed her name might earn 361,708,20 Euros less over the course of her working life, due to this bit of discrimination alone.
The size of the impact of any one piece or type of discrimination is less important than the fact that this discrimination still exists, in all the nooks and crannies in business decision-making.
Discrimination is invidious. It is everywhere. Thank goodness it is less blatant, less overt, that it used to be. But that doesn’t mean discrimination is gone, and that we don’t have to worry about it now that we have put so many corrections into place.
There is so much hard work still to do. There are fewer big wins, like chances to change policies that required women to give up jobs with travel expectations once they had kids, or presumptions that put African-American sales reps in urban territories rather than less “diverse” territories with higher potential.
Instead, what we’ve got to change are a myriad of minor moments of discrimination – the ones that happen as we scan a page and sort people into the “maybe pile” and the “no pile.”
We shouldn’t be too quick to assume that gender bias doesn’t exist, and that race-based discrimination at work is a thing of the past.
We’re likely to be wrong.
See Women, Work and a Name Change By Catherine Rampell in The New York Times online for the story.
Image: Judgment day begins…. from DeepBluC