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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?

#61

Post by quickthrower2 »

chrinic83 wrote: post #25
throwawaymath wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

stcredzero? "Urban high school kid" isn't jumping out at me. ...Actually, nothing jumps out at me at all. I'm not sure what to make of it. Why do they read high school kid out of that?

"Millennial" here. stcredzero. Street credit. Usually referred to as social status in the neighborhood and local friend groups. Usually used by rappers and African American neighborhoods. However, people living in these neighborhoods don't actually say this today. Typically middle and high school students hear this on TV/radio and use it in their own (usually upper/middle class) circles to increase their social statu…

Are you an over the top 35/36 year old?

Re: Can fake names create bias in interviewing?

#62

Post by manfredo »

eli wrote: post #57
manfredo wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. Pro tip, give your kid a name like "Rafael". I trust our company's lawyers as to whether or not this is legal. Race does not directly affect hiring decisions. It only affects resume review and phone screen. So it does affect the population that get to the on-site. But functionally this doesn't seem much different than say, recruiting at an HBCU.

Deciding where to locate a recruiting event is different than deciding which applicants to move to the next stage.

One could say that deciding where to hold recruiting events dictates which people go from the "zeroth stage" of not being in the application pool at all to th first stage of resume review.

Re: Can fake names create bias in interviewing?

#63

Post by sct202 »

kristianc wrote: post #23
manfredo wrote: post #20

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 hi…

This comment reminds me somewhat of the Oxford and Cambridge interviewing processes. They have names and educational backgrounds to hand, and it's well known that all things being equal, tutors would always rather go for a kid from a state echool / underprivileged / non traditional background over one that went to a top public school. It's not just a matter of hitting targets - the alternative is that everyone who ge…

It's kind of unfair to compare raw stats of kids who went to elite prep schools vs poor public schools.

Like I was thinking about the amount of activities, tutors, private school my SO and I could pay for if we had a kid. And it was kind of insane to compare that versus what we grew up with, and how different our own HS resumes would have been with the same level of resources.

Re: Can fake names create bias in interviewing?

#64

Post by [deleted] »

manfredo wrote: post #20

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 hi…

[deleted]

Re: Can fake names create bias in interviewing?

#65

Post by eli »

manfredo wrote: post #20

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 hi…

I really and truly want to hire more members of underrepresented groups, but I would never take an applicant's race into account in whether or not to hire them.

It sounds legally very questionable and, in any event, is unfair to applicants. We owe it to them to judge them on their merits as an employee as best we can. If we're not getting as many minority applicants as we'd like, it's on us to examine our our culture, recruiting, marketing, inclusivity, benefits, retention, etc.

Re: Can fake names create bias in interviewing?

#66

Post by hhs »

I think there are lots of factors involved with names, but yeah.

Even the spelling of names makes a difference. Interesting example: Dale Carnegie deliberately changed his last name from "Carnagey" to "Carnegie" so people, on some subliminal way, may associate him with the classy steel-building Andrew Carnegie family.

Re: Can fake names create bias in interviewing?

#67

Post by manfredo »

pjc50 wrote: post #52
DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd hate to work somewhere knowing I was hired because the color of my skin and not my abilities. maybe less of an issue in non-brainy jobs, but in Tech I would feel more insecure not knowing if I got the job to fill a quota. This sounds rather disgusting to me.

Because of the way subconscious prejudice works, unless you put a finger on the scale in the other direction then all the white guys are hired (in part) because of their appearance.

Well, Asians are getting hired at ~3x the rate of Whites in Bay area tech firms. So it can't just be benefitting Whites. In fact, at many Bay area companies Whites are a minority. Not that I'm trying to grind an axe here, but it is pretty much counterfactual to say that explicitly meritocratic hiring benefits Whites above all others.

For what it's worth I think this question about hiring practices is welded to the the question of whether equality of opportunity vs. equality of outcome. It's really the question of "is it okay to create unequal opportunities to engineer more equal outcomes?"

Questions like these have no static answer. Rather, society develops and continuously evolves a consensus about what the right answer is.

Re: Can fake names create bias in interviewing?

#68

Post by mont »

chrinic83 wrote: post #25
throwawaymath wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

stcredzero? "Urban high school kid" isn't jumping out at me. ...Actually, nothing jumps out at me at all. I'm not sure what to make of it. Why do they read high school kid out of that?

"Millennial" here. stcredzero. Street credit. Usually referred to as social status in the neighborhood and local friend groups. Usually used by rappers and African American neighborhoods. However, people living in these neighborhoods don't actually say this today. Typically middle and high school students hear this on TV/radio and use it in their own (usually upper/middle class) circles to increase their social statu…

I'd guess that the race/gender percentages you have or more so from where you're interacting with stcredzero than there name.

Re: Can fake names create bias in interviewing?

#69

Post by AcerbicZero »

jfk13 wrote: post #33
manfredo wrote: post #20

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 hi…

> 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. (Implied: in order to favour them at some point in the process.) Is that even legal? So as an individual with a traditional Western European male name, I would be at a relative disadvantage if I applied to your company. H…

It's also possible that companies which try to optimize hiring of knowledge workers with varying degrees of talent based on the ethnicity of their name will perform poorly over the long run, so being disadvantaged in the hiring process is actually an advantage for your career as a whole.

Re: Can fake names create bias in interviewing?

#70

Post by eli »

onewhonknocks wrote: post #31

This reminds me of an interesting Harvard study I read a few years ago titled 'Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal'. It can be found here: https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/sendhil/files/are_emily_an...

There's another famous study where tenure committees members ranked CVs with traditionally male names on them better than ones with traditionally female names. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023%2FA%3A101883920369...
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