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How Subtle Class Cues Can Backfire on a Resume (2016)
- na85 10y agoDoes anyone still believe the "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" narrative any more? My understanding was that it had been thoroughly debunked.
- analog31 10y ago"It is a cruel jest to tell the bootless man to pull himself up by his bootstraps." -- Martin Luther King
- emodendroket 10y agoPaul Ryan has described the social safety net as a "hammock" that lures people who are completely able to work into not doing so because they'd rather be on welfare.
- ceejayoz 10y agoPaul Ryan should probably try living on welfare alone for a few years before saying that.
- emodendroket 10y agoIt's obviously nonsense but the point is that such an idea is far from dead.
- humanrebar 10y agoIt's primarily an economic argument, not a moralistic one.
- emodendroket 10y agoI'm not sure that's right, but even if it is, I believe the parent's point is that nobody who'd actually had to live on welfare in the United States would conceive of it as an easy, carefree life that someone would prefer to steady work.
- humanrebar 10y agoWell, either way, the argument is that the handcuffs are economic ones. The incentives are arranged to keep people stuck in their current economic situations regardless of how anyone feels about it. For example, many benefits are withdrawn when people make over a certain income, basically punishing earning. Likewise, many benefits are cut off when a couple gets married, punishing people who officially form stable families. It's not about gaming the system or preferring being on the take. It's about economic incentives producing predictable outcomes. These are all arguments people make for minimum incomes and negative income taxes. They economically encourage people to pursue growth instead of punishing them for it.
- elchief 10y agoYa $500/month, self shaming, and ridicule by everyone you know sounds great
- rlanday 10y agoYou or I might be ridiculed by everyone we know because of the social class we’re in, but what if half your friends are doing the exact same thing you are?
- inthewoods 10y agoIronic given that he benefited from the same safety net he wants to destroy: https://www.google.com/amp/www.rawstory.com/2011/04/paul-ryan-already-benefitted-from-the-social-security-fund-he-now-wants-to-gut/amp/ https://www.google.com/amp/www.rawstory.com/2011/04/paul-rya...
- yummyfajitas 10y agoDo you have any evidence he is wrong? Most of the evidence I've seen (here are mainstream descriptions of it) suggest he is completely right about that. Currently California farmers are desperately raising wages in the hopes of finding workers. Yet millions of able bodied men continue to sit at home playing video games and consuming oxycontin, paid for by the social safety hammock. http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-fi-farms-immigration/ http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-fi-farms-immigration/ http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/ http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/ https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/our-miserable-21st-century/ https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/our-miserable-21...
- emodendroket 10y agoHere I was thinking we had an addiction crisis and weak labor market and it turns out a bunch of people have made the completely rational determination that shooting up heroin and collecting some of the stingiest welfare benefits in the OECD is better than working. I wonder, by the way, how carefully you read the article claiming "In our era of no more than indifferent economic growth, 21st–century America has somehow managed to produce markedly more wealth for its wealthholders even as it provided markedly less work for its workers" before linking it to prove your claim that the unemployed are just too damn lazy to work.
- yummyfajitas 10y agoAs the CA farms going unstaffed show (or our 4.9% unemployment rate), we clearly don't have a weak labor market. If you believe welfare is "stingy", can you name a good or service that non-workers lack? (Remember, I have a secret power - I sometimes read Census and BLS reports and pull them out in internet arguments.) I wonder, by the way, how carefully you read the article claiming... I read it carefully enough to separate the factual claims from the mood affiliation. You should try it sometime.
- emodendroket 10y agoU6 unemployment numbers and inflation-adjusted household incomes don't tell the same story, and the anecdote about Californian farms hardly seems like much to base an argument on. But you've got superpowers and are uniquely capable of separating facts from opinion so why bother arguing with the plebes?
- pitaj 10y agoIt may not be comfortable, but it certainly does trap the poor in poverty especially when combined with ghetto public housing and other misguided efforts. A UBI does not suffer from this same issue.
- c22 10y agoI think it's debunked in the saying itself.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- brohoolio 10y agoI think the differences between gender are fascinating. Upper class women are not selected for interviews because there is a perception that they won't be as committed, implying they might get married and stay home with the kids.
- psyc 10y agoIf, as the saying goes, women marry upwards, then the bias could also be explained by how attainable they're perceived to be. edit: Lol. My goodness, HN does not like that idea much.
- emodendroket 10y agoI'm sorry?
- pavel_lishin 10y agoWhat?
- elchief 10y agoDon't bang pots in an echo chamber
- sk5t 10y agoI think it's an idea worthy of some discussion. Perhaps companies destined to mint a raft of 10x-millionaires would show different hiring trends--although I recognize the extreme difficulty of gathering adequate clean data.
- emodendroket 10y agoIf the idea is that men are trying to hire women they can marry then you should probably take into account the fact that cross-class marriages have become very uncommon.
- Digory 10y agoIt's not just kids, is it? That's too middle brow at these firms. It's perfectly acceptable for a woman to graduate from the firm to be a full-time "socialite" or join the charity circuit. "Playboy" is about as close as it gets for a man, and not nearly as acceptable. It's a different kind of sexism, but a higher-class one.
- cheez 10y agoWell shit.
- HarryHirsch 10y agoI worked for Miss Lilly Pulitzer once. She was intolerable. The imperious demeanor, the unwillingness to listen to reason, the papered-over cluelessness, it did not work out well. Never again! Here's a fun thought: elsethread age discrimination is discussed. If an employer shouldn't be allowed to discriminate by age, should they be allowed to discriminate by class?
- retroBunny 10y agoIf an employer shouldn't be allowed to discriminate by age, should they be allowed to discriminate by class? Maybe employers shouldn't ever be allowed to choose anything. Maybe employers should just accept fate, and endure the burdens imposed on them by random chance and fate. With the first person that walks through the door, just give in and let it happen. Small employers, large employers, all employers, one size fits all.
- emodendroket 10y agoSo what's the claim here? If an employer wants to hire only white men (and no hardscrabble backgrounds, please) regardless of qualifications that should just be allowed? That we should have a permanent underclass instead?
- aurelianito 10y agoI can understand that underprivileged people has to be educated in order to be able to compete. That's why I support quotas for them in universities. But, why is this needed at work? Shouldn't this be solved by the market? If a company only hires white men then you should be at a competitive disadvantage against another company that can chose the best workers from other backgrounds too. Or is this an admission that white men actually perform better than the rest? I don't think so, but maybe the ones who write the policies do.
- emodendroket 10y agoDid you read the article you're commenting on? There are far fewer of these positions than there are applicants and if employers across the board just don't think kids with the "wrong" socioeconomic background are gonna fit in the market isn't going to fix the problem. It seems hard to argue that this is all about merit when the only difference between the hypothetical candidates in the study are class markers and gender.
- chrismealy 10y agoWho puts hobbies on a resume anyway? Who the fuck cares?
- zootam 10y agousually people put activities/achievements on resumes, not just hobbies. often they can indicate positive traits- passion, involvement, ownership, leadership, responsibility, etc.. certainly a good idea to list activities and achievements that come from 'hobbies' on your resume.
- emodendroket 10y agoThat's the thing, though, isn't it? Being on a vestry, for instance, is a leadership role, but it also reveals a lot about the candidate that isn't really relevant and may prejudice the hiring person's judgment.
- emodendroket 10y agoIt's much more common for new graduates, who after all don't have a long work history to cite.
- nradov 10y agoIt depends on the job and hobby. If you're applying for a developer job at a bank than listing photography as a hobby is a waste of space. But if you're applying for a job at a photo sharing site then it can't hurt.
- elchief 10y agoIf you like skiing, and so does your potential boss, guess what?
- draw_down 10y agoWhat?
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- emodendroket 10y agoI'd posit that young tech companies have similar problems, even if the particulars are different than law firms.
- iak8god 10y ago"cultural fit"
- emodendroket 10y agoYeah, like that one.
- andrewclunn 10y agoIf you want to be judged based on your ability rather than people's biases or your appearance, avoid "soft sill" professions. Just a word of advice.
- emodendroket 10y ago"If you're from the wrong background just don't apply for prestigious, high-paying jobs. Problem solved."
- andrewclunn 10y agoYou can't change the direction of the wind, but you can adjust your sails. Practical advice about how the world works always pisses off people who are more interested in bitching about how unfair it is.
- emodendroket 10y agoIt would be quite a different world we live in if everyone thought that way.
- icebraining 10y agoUnfathomable as it may sound, one can adjust one's sails and still bitch about how unfair it is.
- andrewclunn 10y agoSomething I never implied couldn't be done, but which others do, by virtue of attacking any offering such practical advice.
- Mvandenbergh 10y agoThere's often a conflict between effective and practical advice to individuals on the one hand and dealing with broader social issues on the other. I might believe that cleaners should be paid more and that there's nothing wrong with manual labour, that doesn't mean I'd tell my children - living in today's world as it is - that there's no reason they should prefer a job as a cleaner to a job as a lawyer or an engineer.
- jimmyswimmy 10y agoThe clues may be less subtle and still affect employers decisions. I've read thousands of resumes and I always get frustrated when I can read more into the resume than may have been intended. Membership in the "hundred black men" or the "Aidan American student organization" provides me with information I would prefer not to know. Ideally when I review a resume I only want to know whether or not I think you might be qualified and worth wasting time on a phone call. Providing that information makes it harder for me to pretend that I am hiring blindly. The idea that there are even more subtle clues is fascinating. When hiring engineers, such clues have remained entirely subliminal to me. There must be some but honestly it wouldn't have occurred to me that there is a class difference between those interested in sailing and those who like track and field. I would probably guess that a track athlete would get along better in my company. Perhaps we are just low class.
- framed4Blame 10y agoIf sailing a boat makes you low class, then someone better call a few thousand Indians and tell them to break out their champagne bottles and ring in the new year with gusto instead of phishing for dollars with their hand woven nets. If you wish to espouse black nationalism, you could be a bit braver and say so, or you could continue to figure out ways to promote your agenda without being as overt as this post clearly is. Also: hiding behind a phone sure is easy when you're locked up and have nothing but hate to espouse, but it takes real man to engender peace instead of spreading lies about what is and what isn't logically sound. Give up. Your cause is lost, the nations of the world that prosper do so via cooperation of all cultures present, not by establishing dominance through intimidation. In other words, lead by example, bruh
- thaumasiotes 10y ago> I always get frustrated when I can read more into the resume than may have been intended. Membership in the "hundred black men" or the "A[si]an American student organization" provides me with information I would prefer not to know. Would you resent a resume from an applicant named "Mengying Zhou"? Would that carry less information than membership in the Asian American student association? I claim it carries more.
- mahyarm 10y agoThat top header takes way too much space and there is no obvious was to minimize it :/ Bad form.
- emodendroket 10y agoDoes every discussion need an aside where we all decry modern Web design and pine for the halcyon days when pages didn't use JavaScript?
- mahyarm 10y agoMost websites linked to here and other news websites don't have extra thick top headers like that. It only shows up when you scroll down to the middle too. When you scroll down today on most websites, the headers get smaller. This is not about modern design, this is just bad. See CNN for example: http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/25/politics/donald-trump-paul-ryan-inside-obamacare-repeal/index.html http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/25/politics/donald-trump-paul-rya... NY Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/25/us/politics/trump-health-care-defeat-gop-civil-war.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/25/us/politics/trump-health-... Time: http://time.com/4713270/las-vegas-strip-gunman-bus-cosmopolitan/?xid=homepage http://time.com/4713270/las-vegas-strip-gunman-bus-cosmopoli...
- hn_throwaway_99 10y agoGreat study. I think this perfectly underscores the concept of what "privilege" is, in a scientifically robust way. I have a worry about one of the implied conclusions, though. The high-status women were clearly discriminated against based solely on gender. However (and trying to tread carefully here), it is at least possible that a high status woman would be more likely to leave for family reasons than a high status man. That doesn't make the discrimination any better, but it also means the employers aren't necessarily acting economically irrationally (of course, there is also the chicken-and-egg problem, in that these high-status women might be more likely to take up a domestic role because they're being discriminated against in the first place). I say this not to give the employers a pass, but to suggest that any real, durable solution to the discrimination shouldn't automatically assume those social factors are imaginary.
- emodendroket 10y agoThe same rationale could be marshaled to argue that discrimination against the disabled and older workers should be allowed. Should it?
- hn_throwaway_99 10y agoBut no where in my comment did I argue that the discrimination should be allowed, and, on the contrary, I believe exactly the opposite. My main point is that sometimes discrimination is not economically irrational. If that's true, but we as a society think that these forms of discrimination are still bad, we need to come up with better, stronger solutions to make sure discrimination of this sort doesn't happen.
- emodendroket 10y agoFair enough. When you put it that way I agree completely.
- YeGoblynQueenne 10y agoWhat you're really saying is that it's rational to be selfish and short-termist. In the long run, everyone benefits if women have the same employment opportunities as men. Women benefit, because duh, men benefit because their female relatives don't depend on them, employers benefit because they have a wider pool of talent to choose from, society benefits because unemployment falls and higher-quality employment rises, and so on, so forth. The "rationality" you are talking about is false rationality. It's rationalisation- an excuse that people tell themselves to justify their inability to give up on the prejudice they've been taught.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- Clubber 10y agoSo, if I pretend to be interested in Polo or golf, the chances of getting a better salary increase. Check.
- rabidrat 10y agoYou just provided a subtle clue about your gender.
- Clubber 10y ago>You just provided a subtle clue about your gender. Wait till they talk to me on the phone. That will be a huge clue. I've always been fascinated with sailing but have never done it, so I'm going to put that in my interests next time I update my resume. I will need to remember to remove competitive spitting.
- dentemple 10y agoBetter yet, instead of going with a Mr/Mrs/Miss prefix, we should prepend our names with "Captain"
- ajross 10y agoThe headline is just wrong. Yes, there was some correlation between "class cues" and resume response rate. But the overwhelming finding (like, 4x the effect!) was gender. Upper class men were wildly more popular than any other group. And in fact upper class women actually underperformed their lower class sisters.
- emodendroket 10y ago"Subtle class cues can backfire" seems like a factual assessment of the finding that being a lower-class man or upper-class woman hurts your chances of being called back.
- ajross 10y agoBut it's not symmetric. Women and lower class men don't get the same response rates, but they're clearly in a cluster of broadly similar numbers. Upper class men are enormously advantaged in this study. And that finding is being buried by the headline.
- emodendroket 10y agoThe finding for women is less pronounced but it's not what a lot of us would expect and it's worthy of examination too.
- ajross 10y agoBut once more: if you had to write a headline for this data, why pick a subtle effect due to class instead of a glaring one based on gender?
- icebraining 10y agoBecause the sample size is bigger, hence the statistical significance is stronger. The other is more likely to be a fluke.
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- wruvjg 10y agoNo comment on how lower class women got 5 times the callback rate of lower class men? Almost exactly the rate at which upper class men outperformed upper class women? Is this reporting on the study biased in any way?
- clarebear 10y agoThe differences in callback rates were not statistically different between the women and the lower class men. The only statistically significant different was higher class men and everyone else.
- SilverSlash 10y agoExactly what I first thought when I read it. While upper class men have it the best, lower class men seem to have it the worst. This was entirely ignored by the author which is ridiculous. She is trying to hammer the point about bias towards women while entirely ignoring the bias towards lower class men found by her own survey.
- SubiculumCode 10y agoI'm not sure the difference is big enough to be statistically reliable in this sample.
- GavinMcG 10y agoNo, her research did a more in depth exploration of the difference between the higher class groups. It's legitimate to ask why that difference was studied while the other one wasn't, but it's not legitimate to ask for speculation about the lower class difference when it wasn't specifically studied.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- FT_intern 10y agoIf she was attempting to use gender as an independent variable, she should have. The conclusions and research are very incomplete otherwise. It looks like she is just slicing up the data to get the results she wants.
- mindcrime 10y agoWait a minute... hang on. Every fall, tens of thousands of law students compete for a small number of coveted summer associateships at the country’s top law firms. ... For these reasons, employment in top law firms has been called the legal profession’s 1% Our findings confirm that, despite our national myth that anyone can make it if they work hard enough, the social class people grow up in greatly shapes the types of jobs (and salaries) they can attain, regardless of the achievements listed on their resumes. Just when exactly did the bar for saying that somebody "made it" become working for "the legal profession's 1%". That's a ridiculously high bar... to the point of absurdity. And while it doesn't contradict the results themselves, it certainly colors the interpretation. I mean, if you think the only thing that matters in life is to be in the 1% of your profession, then fine. But most people would be happy with a bar quite a bit lower than that... a steady job which puts them solidly in the middle class, or anything higher (in terms of socio-economic class). Curiously, I feel like I see this "moving the goalpost" stuff quite often in articles which try to argue against the idea of meritocracy or the importance of work ethic and individual effort. Probably not a conspiracy, but perhaps a form of bias..
- brudgers 10y agoA meritocracy would provide equal access to the top of the profession -- the suffix 'ocracy' is from the Greek and loosely translated as ruling or powerful as in 'democracy' or 'theocracy'. If people are limited or advanced on the basis of something other than merit, then it is not a meritocracy.
- aianus 10y agoBut playing golf with your rich white male clients and putting them at ease is a core requirement of this job. You literally can't do your job well as an elite lawyer if you don't have a good rapport with rich old white people.
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- hasenj 10y agoWhy do tens of thousands of people have to compete for a small number of positions? Something it's clearly wrong. It seems like the study treats working in a job as a favor received by the peasants from the slave masters. Or, the study purposely set up a scenario that matches this idea of what work is.
- hn_throwaway_99 10y ago> Why do tens of thousands of people have to compete for a small number of positions? Is this a serious question? Why are there tons of actors competing for an infinitesimal shot in Hollywood? Because some people want to make more money/prestige than less.
- hasenj 10y agoIt's a serious question because that is not the normal state of affairs. Part of being a responsible adult should be about wisely choosing a career that fits with who you are and has a reasonable future. If you choose that kind of career, where you either make it to the top 1% or spend the rest of your life broke, then I honestly have no sympathy for you if you don't get selected to be among the 1%
- chris11 10y ago> Part of being a responsible adult should be about wisely choosing a career that fits with who you are and has a reasonable future. I don't think law is an especially good field right now. But fields having jobs with extremely different levels of compensation is normal. I was looking at doctors pay, and top specialities earn an average of over 400k/yr why the lowest paying onse earn closer to 200k/yr. In cs there are some internships that offer close to 100k/yr for 10-12 weeks. That's close to the average salary for fulltime developers in the US. https://stackoverflow.com/insights/survey/2017 https://stackoverflow.com/insights/survey/2017
- somestag 10y agoSurely you must know that you're blowing down a straw man here. Your statements all presume, for no reason, that these people are gambling, and that if they lose their gamble they will have "no reasonable future." The article is about law students. There is absolutely nothing unreasonable for shooting for the top 1%, because if they don't make it they'll just end up with a lawyer at a non-top-1% law firm. Their pay will be fine. (If they're at the bottom of their class or whatever, that's a separate issue.) In the case of actors, yeah; everyone knows being an actor is a bad economic choice. Presumably those people have a definition of "reasonable future" that accommodates trying for their dream, and then falling back on something else if they fail. In any case, discrimination is bad, even when it comes to moonshots. Surely it's productive to analyze hiring trends and discuss whether or not discrimination is, in fact, taking place.
- ouid 10y agothe assertion that this is scientifically robust is pretty flimsy. I would never hire anyone who listened to country music, regardless of background.
- sk5t 10y agoPerhaps if it's the blues-based, sad country music, things are not so bad. Listening to party-n-fishin' nu-country is a hard no.
- emodendroket 10y agoThe whole point here is that country music is strongly associated with a particular class background. Saying you wouldn't hire someone who liked it "regardless of class background" rings rather hollow in almost the same way saying you'd never hire someone with an afro regardless of their race rings hollow. Incidentally, I rather like country music, but even if I hated it I think choosing not to hire someone because of the music they like is idiotic.
- xxpor 10y agoI seriously hope this is a joke.
- matthewaveryusa 10y agoWhat he's getting at is that 'country' is polarizing music. Either you love it or hate it. So why would you, as a rational individual seeking the best outcome for yourself in your job application, put something so polarizing on your resume unless there's something a bit wrong with you? If the resume had 'avid Republican/Democrat' or 'pro-life/choice' as interests I would pause, not because I would try to figure out if their interests align with mine, but because I would wonder why anyone would put such a polarizing gamble in their resume.
- jusssi 10y ago> So why would you, as a rational individual seeking the best outcome for yourself in your job application, put something so polarizing on your resume Well I wouldn't want to work somewhere that polarizes over such an unrelated mainstream thing (it's not like it was Norwegian church burning metal). So finding out right away would be in my best interest.
- rafinha 10y agoMaybe the interviewers bias resume selection to their own profiles. Because most people come from elite families, mostly people from elite families get interviewed.
- imjustsaying 10y agoThis makes total sense. If you're high class, you're going to yield more business for the firm if for no other reasons than deep social connections to people who can afford to buy the firm's product. If you're a woman, statistically you're more likely to work for the firm for a brief time before you retiring to being a wife in your late 20’s or early 30’s - a huge sunk cost for an elite firm that invests heavily in its employees. If the firms were outright discriminating against someone unjustly due to some kind of shadowy and insidious patriarchy or class hierarchy preservation desire, they would get crushed in the free market for making systematically wrong decisions. But given that they're the top 5% law firms, it looks like their heuristics are correct - high class males are more often than not going to make them a ton more money than other groups.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- icebraining 10y agoSo what you're saying is that the market system in which we operate promotes and rewards gender discrimination even among people who wouldn't discriminate otherwise. So you agree with the concept of patriarchy in feminist theory.
- imjustsaying 10y agoYou can't avoid market forces. You might disagree with gravity but you're still going to fall to the ground after jumping. If you're suggesting that laws be created to satisfy a personal fantasy, you must realize you're unavoidably advocating for creating artificial market effects which put law firms out of business and increase prices for other law firms, putting their availability further out of reach of poor people, and women.
- Mvandenbergh 10y ago>If you're a woman, statistically you're more likely to work for the firm for a brief time before you retiring to being a wife in your late 20’s or early 30’s - a huge sunk cost for an elite firm that invests heavily in its employees. Surely that would be perfect for a law firm? If they left after the first year, yeah that would be bad, but the engine-room of a law firm is made up of the senior associates. It would be ideal for the partners if some of them were to leave just as they were to come up for partner.
- tjalfi 10y agoThe cited paper is available at http://www-2.rotman.utoronto.ca/facbios/file/RiveraTilcsik.pdf http://www-2.rotman.utoronto.ca/facbios/file/RiveraTilcsik.p...
- SilverSlash 10y agoI don't understand one thing though - Why doesn't she talk about the fact that according to their own survey, lower class women were also 5 times more likely to get a callback than lower class men. So while upper class men have it the best, lower class men have it the worst. But the author seems to be ignoring this entirely.
- SubiculumCode 10y agoIDK, maybe something called confidence intervals?
- SubiculumCode 10y agoWhy did that deserve a downvote? The difference between lower class men and women in that study was small,and I doubt that difference would meet a p=.05 confidence threshold. When it was said that lower class men are 4 times less likely than lower class women to be invited to interview this was an overstatement of the confidence we can extrapolate these results to the population. But hey,if that wasn't clearly inferred by my comment, so be it.
- tristor 10y agoYou most likely got downvoted for being snarky and condescending, not for pointing out the that the difference doesn't meet the confidence threshold. Your follow-up is better because it at least provides a fully encapsulated response, but you still have some snark in your tone. When replying try not to imply that other commenters are stupid.
- FT_intern 10y agoIf I'm reading correctly, there wasn't a p-value for the upper middle class men vs women either
- rhblake 10y agoBecause that difference wasn't statistically significant, as noted in the image in the article.
- fatdog 10y agodidn't notice them controlling for the overwhelming gender skew in HR and recruiting. The callback and phone screens imply that upper middle class women in law firm HR depts are filtering out peers in favor of upper middle class men. First, almost nobody actually plays polo anymore, and they wouldn't lead with it if they did. The researchers may have spent more time reading f. scott fitzgerald than thinking this though, and the HR staff would take a flyer on it because mr. darcy. I have been asked to put personal interests on my CV by recruiters so that their clients would have something to remember my profile by. What that means is "show your natural interest in team sports." Track and field isn't something you talk to people about or want to hear a story about. Those CVs were likely filtered because they actually seemed too boring for a business that is based on dynamic teamwork and building relationships. Based on the article, what is clear is that the researchers have no experience with either sports or class.
- jzwinck 10y agoSailing is a very stereotypical rich man's sport, and track & field is perfect for the poor (low equipment and facilities costs). So it's no surprise the research used these. But they are saddled with a confounding factor: participant age. The person reviewing your resume will likely be over 30 years old, maybe over 40. And they probably have more money than you. This makes it more likely that they participate in sailing or golf and less likely that they do track & field. You may benefit from sharing an interest with your hiring manager or recruiter, and maybe it just happens they like things enjoyed by adults with money. Rather than judging you because you like cheap stuff. A rich man's sport that doesn't favor older folks so much is crew (rowing). That would have been a better choice than sailing IMO.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- adjkant 10y ago> "The person reviewing your resume will likely be over 30 years old, maybe over 40. And they probably have more money than you. This makes it more likely that they participate in sailing or golf and less likely that they do track & field." This isn't an error in the study in my opinion, it's a reason why discrimination happens, which you've highlighted. People are more likely to hire someone like them, who they can relate to. It's the same category as "culture fit". It's something that people hiring need to consciously be aware of and account for. That's a very reasonable conclusion from this.
- sundvor 10y agoCycling would have been an interesting choice. Barriers to entry are relatively low, and it is plenty popular with middle aged people. At least in Australia.
- closeparen 10y agoEach time I've lived near a harbor, there was a nonprofit sailing club where you could join for $100/year or so, take classes, participate in friendly races, sign out boats for a couple hours for fun, and volunteer maintaining them. Usually had full scholarships for underprivileged kids, and totally affordable fees for middle class families. It's kind of concerning that when I talk about sailing, people read that as a signal that anyone in my family is rich enough to own and maintain a boat.
- MichaelMoser123 10y agoThe good thing about tech is that professional interview is more important than the HR interview. No matter how bad a tech interview can be - non technical professions have it worse why do CV's even have an 'extracurricular activities'/'Personal interests' section? (asking because i never had one in my CV) Is this exclusive to first job applicants? another question: is having no awards better than having 'low class awards' ? (Ah, got it: they are looking for signs of a first impression bias - these biases are likely to play a role during the interview process (given that these biases exist) )
- kolinko 10y agoAs a person who did just a little bit of hiring for small projects: to find people who are energetic and take matters in their own hands.
- MichaelMoser123 10y agothat means i shouldn't mention hobbies in the CV unless i am in mountaineering, is that right?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- ufmace 10y agoI'm guessing it has that stuff because they're fresh law school grads and have virtually no real job experience, so you gotta fill the page and fill out their picture of you with something. Most people I know with professional careers have more trouble figuring out what to shorten and cut out to keep it to 2 pages.
- Mvandenbergh 10y agoLawyers at these firms don't really do anything like an "HR interview", they're being interviewed by partners in the business for fit.
- walshemj 10y agoIt shows if you have a hinterland it helps with the airport test
- 999natas 10y agoI don't see any subtle cues here. An important skill for a lawyer is to know how to present facts in the most favorable light. Take the study's James Clark. He won a "University award for outstanding athletes on financial aid", but it would be just as accurate for him to say simply that he won a "University award for outstanding athletes". Why not mention financial aid? Because it's not something that makes him a better lawyer. It doesn't serve the purpose of the resume. I can just see someone reading the resume and imagining all the dumb things James would write in a court filing and what the result to the client would be.
- sxyuan 10y agoThat sounds plausible enough - except the authors also undertook a follow-up study to determine the cause of the difference. The attorneys they surveyed could have pointed to a lack of competence displayed in the resume writing, as you suggest. Instead, they identified culture fit as the distinguishing factor.
- EliRivers 10y ago"culture fit" really has become the code of our time for "looks funny / speaks differently / isn't the same as us".
- EliRivers 10y agoI suspect a naive applicant might think that demonstrating he required financial aid, and thus made good despite coming from a poor background, would have demonstrated that he's a better choice than someone who had it much easier but achieved the same results. He must surely be a harder worker and/or smarter. For better or for worse, though, it turns out these law firms (as many firms) like to hire people the same as themselves so much that it can swamp their liking to hire based on ability. Which is short-sighted on their part, really; a smart, hard worker could be taught to blend in with these people in a month, someone would struggle to learn how to be smart and industrious in a month.
- rlanday 10y ago
- garfieldnate 10y agoPretty fascinating finding! Interesting related book if anyone is interested: Hillbilly Elegy. It's a personal memoir that extensively discusses the struggles of working class whites, particularly Scots-Irish/hillbillies. It helped me understand our last election better, as well.
- VLM 10y agoSometimes the most interesting data point is right out in the open and nobody notices. The author thinks they understand what desirable is, and wrote a paper about gender and class WRT to those closely held beliefs that I'm sure is very interesting. However the truly interesting data point is almost nobody is getting callbacks, failure rates varying from 99% to merely in the 90th percentile. We're not exactly talking about manned space missions where a 99% mission failure rate wouldn't be tolerated. Or imagine if 99% of aircraft landings ended in a fireball. We're talking about the small details of a system that on a large scale is a miserable failure. The author thinks they found the golden boy who everyone loves, but the reality is virtually everybody is uninterested in those people. I would theorize if I had 400 people with medical dwarfism apply to the NBA to be pro basketball centers and then I abused the heck out of SPSS or R I could eventually find a correlation between average skin color and callback rates or perhaps maternal income and callback rates or presence of the father during childhood or whatever. I'm sure it would be an absolutely fascinating paper. But don't miss the forest for the trees, the real story is the people at the NBA who hire pro basketball players hire approximately rounded down to zero people under 4 feet in height, so even if they're subtlety or not so subtlety biased about various demographic characteristics of dwarves, it really doesn't matter because they don't hire dwarves to begin with. Of the people they intensely and strongly dislike and will not hire, they dislike certain demographics slightly less, but virtually all of them are still disliked enough to have approximately zero chance of being hired anyway so it doesn't matter. Its like asking a Catholic convent of nuns what they like to see in a male applicant, and they respond they slightly prefer Catholic male applicants over, say, Jewish male applicants. Which superficially sounds like an incredible religious discrimination scandal, until you point out that Catholic nun convents accept essentially zero male applicants anyway, so ... if a discrimination tree falls in a forest and no one hears it ...
- devonkim 10y agoThe lack of callbacks can be for all sorts of reasons, but I'd speculate that a lot of the employers simply tried to do a really quick validation check (name, school affiliation, etc.) that may even be automated and upon realizing that the individual is made up didn't call back. I think that this experiment indirectly showed how ineffective "cold-calling" via resume-dropping really is for even highly qualified individuals (although they'd have to do it with other industries perhaps for better validity, for example). Meanwhile, I'm sure callback rates are probably higher for industries with no shortage of demand for highly qualified individuals such as software engineering. Law and medicine are a bit overwhelmed with more students than there are jobs for them last I heard.
- wellpast 10y agoIf I saw "University athletics award" on one resume and "University athletics award for someone on financial aid" on another - I am going to be thinking less, one of these persons is lower-class and more Why the heck is the latter one almost going out of its way to be more wordy? I would find the former more succinct and might intuit that this person were better at expressing the essence of information. I'm not saying there isn't bias but I'm not convinced that you can distill the conclusion to purely class. People are complex and any attempt to fake a resume is going to trigger spidey senses. Again I'm sure class-bias is there, but just questioning this study's approach.
- utnick 10y agoIf I received a resume from a collegiate track person I would probably google them out of curiousity to see how fast they were, and in this case I would realize it's a fake name and resume, I wonder if that had any effect on the results
- dllthomas 10y agoConcerns I have, quite possibly addressed in the actual research but seemingly not in an admittedly fast read of the article: The advice seems to be "don't include things that hint you might be low class (in some situations, at least)" - but did they actually include that data point in their analysis? Maybe a lack of class clues is treated as lower class as well. Second, the athletic component of the "lower-class combo" involves competing against a smaller pool of other students, and might rightly be seen as less impressive. If you're in the top 10 of all students, you're clearly also in the top 10 of those on financial aid. Third, pretty much all of the "lower-class combo" involves quite a few more words. I'd be a little surprised if that had a big impact, but I sometimes find myself surprised by the weird shit we react to.
- heynowletsgo 10y agoSo nothing's changed, the status quo remains the most important thing. Shocking. As to why, politics and the love of power. Nothing new.
- rustynails 10y agoI am dubious about the claims made about gender. In particular, it's against the law to discriminate, so, why would anyone make those statements publicly? From my own experience in hiring, I've never heard any of those excuses, save one. Child bearing age was mentioned once, which I dismissed. Anecdotally, I have spoken with a close friend of mine who runs a recruitment business and has so for many years. She has said to me numerous times that she prefers to avoid female senior candidates as they are "the worst". She described them as often being arrogant, pushy, aggressive, opinionated and intolerant among other negative terms. She occasionally tells me of a surprise female candidate which means she's not closed minded, just jaded. She, like me, often uses the term cultural compatibility to differentiate qualified candidates and I've heard her say several times "I would not inflict her on any company, no matter what I think of [that conpany]". In case you're wondering, names are never mentioned. I'm an ear to vent to after she's been abused and we're socialising over a coffee. Is she prejudiced? I don't see her that way (she's very open minded on everything I can think of), except her dislike of political correctness and media. I share those last two vices.
- tomjen3 10y agoReading through their methodology, it seems that they screwed up in giving the lower class person attributes that indicated second best: e.g outstanding atlet vs outstanding atlet $IN_CATHEGORY, which is never going to be as impressive.
- mariodiana 10y agoJust to add a bit of context, here's a NY Times article from 2005: "Many Women at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood." http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/20/us/many-women-at-elite-colleges-set-career-path-to-motherhood.html http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/20/us/many-women-at-elite-col... Among the well-heeled, the MRS degree is not quite dead.