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Can fake names create bias in interviewing?

blog.interviewing.io

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Re: Can fake names create bias in interviewing?

#11

Post by dopamean »

Causality1 wrote: post #4

Of course they do, because we judge people based on what their names tell us about the environment they probably came from. If you have room in your schedule for one interview and you have to choose between "Mary Smith", "Sha'Quonda Jones", and "Bubba-Joe Hartford", you know damn well which one of them is getting your time.

If you really only have time for one interview wouldn't you want to pick the candidate you're most likely to hire? So wouldn't you take a closer look at the resumes and not the names?

Re: Can fake names create bias in interviewing?

#12

Post by krapp »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #8
Causality1 wrote: post #4

Of course they do, because we judge people based on what their names tell us about the environment they probably came from. If you have room in your schedule for one interview and you have to choose between "Mary Smith", "Sha'Quonda Jones", and "Bubba-Joe Hartford", you know damn well which one of them is getting your time.

You're getting down voted (at the time of my comment), but industry hiring practices tend to agree with you.

>but industry hiring practices tend to agree with you.

Yes. Industry hiring practices enforce systemic racial and class prejudice, as illustrated and defended by the GP.

"But one name looks like a hillbilly and one is really black." That's the problem.

Re: Can fake names create bias in interviewing?

#13

Post by camelNotation »

ASpring wrote: post #5
mattigames wrote: post #2

The obsession with biases is a form of bias, you not only have to check what fake name you are submitting, you must make sure the people reading it are the same, that the mood of the people reading its the same and that their way of thinking hasn't changed much; such psychological uncertainties are the same reason psychology experiments are hard to replicate. Not to mention the randomness of things like if your resum…

I completely agree that the questions that we choose to ask determine the knowledge that we get. This experiment is clearly situated within the positivist view of research. However I don't think that invalidates the result, the whole point of randomization of people into the conditions (here the names) is to control for these latent variables like you've talked about (way of reading, mood, etc). Are you critiquing ra…

Randomization solves for the problem, that's true, but that isn't what people are arguing when they criticize social science research like this.

Theoretically, if you have X number of factors you can't control for, then there should be some threshold Y where the sample size benefits from random selection and accounts for those factors. Right now, social scientists have formulas they use to establish what is and is not an acceptable population when doing experiments like this.

The problem that is being identified (and can't be stated often enough, honestly) is that human emotional preferences and variability of experience means that X is far more variable than anyone can conceive. A human being is an extremely complex biological system and that complexity compounds when you begin comparing people to one another and in groups. So unless you are actively controlling for every possible factor in that system, the assumption that you can use any formula to establish a reasonable population size Y is absurd.

Anyone with half a brain can see this, but social science has to deliver on a product and justify its existence with research funding, so it developed standards - like the aforementioned formulas - that allow it to ignore the problem of identifying X and instead just assuming their synthetic Y will do.

This is the real reason why psychologists have a replication crisis and why they always will. Many of them don't even use the standards they have because honestly, they all realize it's nonsense to begin with.

Re: Can fake names create bias in interviewing?

#14

Post by kristianc »

Causality1 wrote: post #4

Of course they do, because we judge people based on what their names tell us about the environment they probably came from. If you have room in your schedule for one interview and you have to choose between "Mary Smith", "Sha'Quonda Jones", and "Bubba-Joe Hartford", you know damn well which one of them is getting your time.

I'm guessing you'd pass on Ta-Nehisi Coates too then?

Re: Can fake names create bias in interviewing?

#15

Post by hiei »

I always considered something similar with my name. For example if my legal name is Ronnie should I put Ron/Ronald on professional resumes/LinkedIn? Even though that's not my real name. Or Donnie vs. Don/Donald. Tommy vs. Tom/Thomas. It just seems anything ending in "ie,y" appears less professional.

Re: Can fake names create bias in interviewing?

#16

Post by DanBC »

Causality1 wrote: post #4

Of course they do, because we judge people based on what their names tell us about the environment they probably came from. If you have room in your schedule for one interview and you have to choose between "Mary Smith", "Sha'Quonda Jones", and "Bubba-Joe Hartford", you know damn well which one of them is getting your time.

It's always surprising when people openly admit to behaviour that puts their company in legal risk.

Re: Can fake names create bias in interviewing?

#17

Post by 40acres »

Given names is one of the most effective way to encode culture. We already know that individuals harbor some biases based on culture, so it's no surprise that there is some bias when people exchange names.

My mother explicitly gave me a "white sounding" name when I was born and in my experience changing your name is one of the most common ways that those from other cultures try to integrate in America and minimize bias.

There are many people in my corporation that are South East Asian but go anglicized names like: John, Kevin and Mary. They usually keep the family name though.

Re: Can fake names create bias in interviewing?

#19

Post by Qwertystop »

Causality1 wrote: post #4

Of course they do, because we judge people based on what their names tell us about the environment they probably came from. If you have room in your schedule for one interview and you have to choose between "Mary Smith", "Sha'Quonda Jones", and "Bubba-Joe Hartford", you know damn well which one of them is getting your time.

Apart from the fact that that's not how I would choose -- I'm not even sure which one you're implying you would choose. Every name there would be filtered out by at least one -ism.

Re: Can fake names create bias in interviewing?

#20

Post by manfredo »

I suspect many companies wouldn't use this as it would make affirmative hiring policies more difficult. For example, recruiters at my company curate lists of names that are majority female, black, or Hispanic (pulled from the census bureau) in order to try and determine which candidates are diverse.

Recruiters at my company aren't explicitly told to hit certain quotas, but they are given larger bonuses for diverse hires and they do have targets for certain percentages of diverse candidate.

Maybe I'm assuming that Bay Area hiring practices are more universal than they really are. Perhaps Bay Area tech companies are under particular pressure to increase the percentage of diverse employees. For instance my company is targeting 33% female tech employees, but most data says women comprise ~20-25% of the tech workforce. Tough to reach those targets without some sort of bias.

For what it's worth I don't think our diversity hiring practices result in any lowered caliber of hires. Most of the affirmative hiring policies only affect resume review and technical phone interviews.

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