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0 pointsmichaelt13y ago0 comments

  I am not a white male bigot who hires people like me. I 
  work with women, non-white, non-atheist, non-Christian, 
  non-liberal, non-leftist, non-English (I'm British), 
  people all day, every day and have done so for many years.

A lot of what candidates expect and interviewers ask comes from what other people do/report having done. Think of how often different companies ask the same brain teasers - and how common it is for companies to ask brain teasers!

I'm sure you don't discriminate - you just want to see my holiday snaps on facebook out of general interest. The problem is it makes looking at people's facebook profiles the norm; today you're doing it, tomorrow every employer is - and they're not all as open-minded as you.

  The fact you assume a potential employer who is betting a 
  substantial amount of money on you is interested in your 
  personal life for any other reason than to  understand you
  better and to make sure you're going to be a great fit, is 
  cynical, naive and misguided.

According to "Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination" by Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan [1] when identical resumes are sent out with traditionally black or white names, resumes with white names get 50% more call backs, across all industries.

I don't think it's naive or misguided to worry about employers subconsciously discriminating.

[1] http://scholar.harvard.edu/mullainathan/files/emilygreg.pdf

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PaulRobinson13y ago

You aren't going to fix that problem by hiding their real names, because the moment they turn up for interview the bigoted response is still going to be there.

So let's have some transparency, and deal with the actual root cause of the problem: racism, anti-Christian or anti-atheist sentiments, and wholesale bigotry in general.

Obfuscating names and past-times and religions might allow people to game it as far as first interview, but how does that help anybody, compared to actually dealing with the root cause issues?

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

I am not a white male bigot who hires people like me. I work with women, non-white, non-atheist, non-Christian, non-liberal, non-leftist, non-English (I'm British), people all day, every day and have done so for many years.

The fact you assume a potential employer who is betting a substantial amount of money on you is interested in your personal life for any other reason than to understand you better and to make sure you're going to be a great fit, is cynical, naive and misguided.