from Hacker News

What Researchers Discovered When They Sent 80k Fake Résumés to U.S. Jobs

by gaius_baltar on 4/8/24, 11:33 AM with 39 comments

• by karaterobot on 4/8/24, 3:23 PM

  I'm not thrilled with a study that includes human subjects without their informed consent, and which resulted in them being both identifiable and called out as racists in the New York Times.

• by hermannj314 on 4/8/24, 3:43 PM

  I took one of those cognitive bias quizzes that showed I have racial bias. It was a hard pill to swallow, to have to acknowledge I am empirically a racist and can't change that. (it dealt with reaction times or some such)

  But what I can change is my behavior that doesnt involve millisecond reaction times. I can use empirical data to make hiring choices. I can stop using phrases like "culture fit" or making decisions based on intuition of how I feel about someone.

  I can do my part to fight cognitive bias by acknowledging it exists and by choosing to do better and make decisions with data, but I can't even trust myself to create the criteria for evaluation without polluting it with my own biases.

  I am not sure why I am posting this. Probably because I want to remind myself that growing up in the rural Midwest put ideas in my head that while I reject them rationally, they have polluted deep parts or my brain that form a large part of my intuition-based decisions.

• by gaius_baltar on 4/8/24, 11:37 AM

  Archived version: https://archive.is/qn32R

• by 1vuio0pswjnm7 on 4/8/24, 8:15 PM

  Feel sorry for "real" applicants having to compete with thousands of "fake" ones.

• by JumpCrisscross on 4/8/24, 2:52 PM

  “On average, they found, employers contacted the presumed white applicants 9.5 percent more often than the presumed Black applicants.

  Yet this practice varied significantly by firm and industry. One-fifth of the companies — many of them retailers or car dealers — were responsible for nearly half of the gap in callbacks to white and Black applicants.

  …

  On average, companies did not treat male and female applicants differently. This aligns with other research showing that gender discrimination against women is rare in entry-level jobs, and starts later in careers.

  However, when companies did favor men (especially in manufacturing) or women (mostly at apparel stores), the biases were much larger than for race.

  ...

  Being gay, as indicated by including membership in an L.G.B.T.Q. club on the résumé, resulted in a slight penalty for white applicants, but benefited Black applicants — although the effect was small, when this was on their résumés, the racial penalty disappeared.”

  That’s more positive than I expected from the headline! The problems are improving and concentrating.

• by ortusdux on 4/8/24, 4:08 PM

  Quantifying subtle biases is very difficult. There was a great study published in 2015 that showed that the skin color of the hands holding baseball cards in eBay listings had a measurable effect on the sale price.

  https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1756-2171.12...

• by sylware on 4/8/24, 11:47 AM

  Did they evaluate regilious in-between-ing? I don't think they could do that, it seems it is very accute. In my country, it seems so much accute, laws were setup to fight just that...

• by instagib on 4/8/24, 2:53 PM

  hacker news finally did something about reposts and automatically upvoted the post. I tried to post this and was instead taken here. I actually tried searching for a prior post but it didn’t show up.

  Working paper doi: 10.3386/w32313