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Helsinki to Begin Anonymous Recruiting

196 points by rendall 8y ago

bufferoverflow 8y ago
This had been tried before, and it failed spectacularly. Women did even worse. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-trial-to-improve-gender-equality-failing-study/8664888 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-tri...
- saintPirelli 8y ago
  They will replicate the results, quietly implement a different protocol and never talk about it again for sure.
- mamon 8y ago
  This matches my experience in IT: sometimes recruiters prefer to hire a girl, even if less qualified, just for sake of having a girl in the team, because it is "improving the morale" :)
  - deelowe 8y ago
    There are tons of studies out there showing monocultures are bad for business. In your case, I'm sure your IT department had to interact with women on occasion. Having women on the team will allow the group to be aware of social considerations specific to women that they may otherwise miss. The people who reviewed and approved the designs for our office space were all males. Guess what they forgot to put in the women's restrooms? When women complained, they put an open trash can next to the toilet with no lid... The problem with the whole conversation around this topic is everyone pretending that women and men on average have the same level of skills and experience as each other. Then they act shocked when there are so few qualified male nurses or female mechanics. Businesses only care about this topic, because it helps them design products and provide services that address a wider market. So, maybe they should just admit they don't always hire the absolute technically best candidate as the goal is to improve the social structure of the team.
    - klohto 8y ago
      Thank you. I have never considered this view. I always hear it’s for the team’s good to be more diverse but never why it’s good to be diverse... I still believe quotas should not be applied everywhere but your example shows an excellent point that they are beneficial in some cases.
  - roberto 8y ago
    Do they also hire "boys"? I think the term you're looking for is "women".
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- bduerst 8y ago
  Where are the results of this Australian study? That news article doesn't list them. Following through on their source [1], it says that the study outcome actually favors women and minority candidates, but it doesn't say how much, or talk about statistical signifance. It seems like the experiment design has been criticized on this one study too, and not releasing the results seems suspect. The study also cites that blind auditions were a success for Orchestras [2]: >In a well-known study analysing data on auditions and hiring by orchestras over this period, Goldin & Rouse (2000) found that the use of blind auditions had a major impact on gender bias in orchestras, increasing the likelihood of female musicians being selected by 25-40%. [1] http://behaviouraleconomics.pmc.gov.au/projects/going-blind-see-more-clearly-unconscious-bias-australian-public-service-aps-shortlisting http://behaviouraleconomics.pmc.gov.au/projects/going-blind-... [2] https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.90.4.715 https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.90.4.715
  - fiestaman 8y ago
    The study states that after anonymization of resumes women were around 3% less likely to get picked and men around 3% more likely. Data were statistically significant at the 99% level. http://behaviouraleconomics.pmc.gov.au/sites/default/files/projects/unconscious-bias.pdf http://behaviouraleconomics.pmc.gov.au/sites/default/files/p... Page 13
- tomp 8y ago
  Don't you mean, succeeded spectacularly? If the composition of candidates was changed when less biased/irrelevant information was displayed, arguably the selection could only be more meritocratic, not less.
  - Fomite 8y ago
    That is only true assuming the selection criteria that weren't blinded were themselves free of bias. That's very rarely true. And if it's not true, arguably what you've done is removed the adjustment variables that could correct the bias, rather than the bias itself.
    - 706f6f70 8y ago
      > were themselves free of bias. At what point do we start growing people solely for the purpose of leading unbiased existences away from all of humanity? Of course these existences are isolated from all humanity lest they associate the human that gives them food with positivity, or someone having a bad day with negativity. And of course, we kill these unbiaseds shortly after every selection process, since the mere process of selection itself, generates bias. Some SF writer must have beaten me to this right?
      - Fomite 8y ago
        Note that, like many machine learning examples of the recent past, the evaluator themselves need not be biased. Just the data.
  - black-tea 8y ago
    Failed because this kind of thing is always done for feminism. It's not done to get closer to a meritocracy.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- manigandham 8y ago
  Failed at what exactly? >> The trial found assigning a male name to a candidate made them 3.2 per cent less likely to get a job interview. Adding a woman's name to a CV made the candidate 2.9 per cent more likely to get a foot in the door. Seems like it did the job of removing existing bias when details were blind.
hardwaresofton 8y ago
I've long suspected this was the only remotely feasible way to remove bias from recruiting (and possibly interviewing itself) -- I'm interested to see how this will go. Politics about bias and diversity aside, if your goal was to objectively disable people from being biased, the simplest solution always seemed to be to remove their ability to apply any of their biases.
- scarmig 8y ago
  I wonder how far it goes. In the USA, there are universities that have very distinctive ethnic compositions: UC Irvine is very different from Howard is very different from BYU. Do they anonymize the university name as well? Perhaps translating it to "large research university" and "liberal arts college." Though probably you can get some signals from there as well.
  - paulie_a 8y ago
    Personally I've never understood the importance put on degrees in the tech field. Sure it is important for your first job, but after 2 years, who cares. When reviewing resumes, if the person has been in the industry for a bit, the degree is irrelevant. And the fancy expensive school, big whoop. I rarely even read that section. I only care about their recent accomplishments and hopefully they have a good number of past ones.
    - turtlecloud 8y ago
      Because of compounding effects of good habits staring in high school that consequently lead to going to a good school.
      - paulie_a 8y ago
        They could have gone to a community college or Stanford, or been a college drop out. It's not going to sway me. What have you accomplished and will you become a productive and good person to work with is all that matters.
dullgiulio 8y ago
Quite interesting how such a thing affects salaries as all yearly personal incomes data is public in Finland.
- walshemj 8y ago
  Always how they got away with that with the Eu's Data Protection laws and now GPDR. Do I have an overriding "need" to know what my neighbour is earning and its certainly open to abuse eg other UK media organisations using it as a stick to beat the BBC with.
hirundo 8y ago
> Anonymous recruiting entails that the ... date of birth ... are not included in the job application If I write on my application that I have 25 years of experience, does that have to be excluded due to it revealing that my date of birth is likely more than 40 years ago? Can they really believe that the amount of experience isn't important?
- scarmig 8y ago
  To be fair, the hiring signal you can get from a description of 25 years of experience is probably comparable to the signal you can get from a description of the most recent 5 or maybe 10 years of experience.
- caymanjim 8y ago
  I'm 46, and people my age talk about leaving off earlier experience, so as not to look too old. I condensed my earlier experience (the first 10 years) into a couple sentences describing the roles--not to look younger, but because with an average stint of 2.5 years, there are just too many jobs to list. Other steps people my age take are to stop listing dates--either select dates like university graduation, or--in extreme cases--all employment dates. Keep in mind that there are different biases at different screening points along the way. The manager with the open position may want someone older and more experienced, but the people recruiting, screening, and filtering the candidates may be biased or simply not familiar with the value of experience that doesn't match today's buzzwords.
  - CGamesPlay 8y ago
    I've got about 14 years of development experience and I also leave off some of my earlier experience on my resume. I do it not to conceal my age, but because the stuff I was doing 10 years ago is so much less interesting and relevant to my applications today. Does my outlook not resonate with you/other older employees?
    - caymanjim 8y ago
      It does with me, but I'm less picky about traditional experience than most people. I'd prefer a list of technologies that someone knows, a list of things they want to work on, and a blurb about how they might fit in to the role I'm hiring for. The cover letter seems to have fallen out of fashion, but I find a couple paragraphs of prose far more revealing about a person's abilities than a resume. Of course it's also more work to craft one for every position you're interested in, and doesn't help much if you're looking to put yourself into a database for recruiters (e.g. LinkedIn or any other job site), where they force you to iterate your experience in chronological order and list technologies with no context. I think it's important to leave off things you're not interested in. I did Perl for years but there is no amount of money that would get me to do it again, so I minimize or eliminate its presence on my resume, and put extra emphasis on the technologies I want to work with now.
jeffbarg 8y ago
The most shocking part of this to me is the last line: "The City of Helsinki is Finland’s biggest employer with around 38,000 employees." Is this common for governmental organizations to be such large employers? Even in Europe, this is surprising to me.
- Tuna-Fish 8y ago
  Finland has a national health care system where most health care workers work for the municipalities. Add to that teachers, social workers and that covers most of it.
- fipple 8y ago
  Yes, the federal government is the US’s largest employer.
- ed_balls 8y ago
  NHS (Great Britain - state owned health provider) is on a track to reach 2mln employees.
  - gaius 8y ago
    Precious few of them nurses but there’s always room on the org chart for more middle managers.
- jahaja 8y ago
  I think so. 39,000 in Stockholm. http://www.stockholm.se/OmStockholm/Forvaltningar-och-bolag/ http://www.stockholm.se/OmStockholm/Forvaltningar-och-bolag/
- dudul 8y ago
  The US Department of Defense is literally the biggest employer in the world. 38,000 for a capital city in a country with real health care, public schools and developed public services is not that much.
- cafard 8y ago
  Washington, DC, reports 36 thousand FTE for this fiscal year.
mms1973 8y ago
What about doing the same for politicians running for office? show us your "accomplishments", we don't care about the rest, LOL.
Haitischmock 8y ago
People are going to fake a lot more degrees and other qualifications. When they come in for an in-person interview racial/gender/age/whatever bias is still going to be there. Only way to prevent this would be to forbid in-person interviews before hiring/signing a conract, but then companies would presumably simply stop hiring from applications, because the qualifications are unreliable and they can't get a character impression of the applicant. Hiring by reference from existing employees would become the norm (maybe it already is).
- donald123 8y ago
  Why would someone do that if they know the faked degrees or qualifications won't pass the background check eventually? Just to get an onsite interview?
  - adontz 8y ago
    Yes, just to get an onsite interview. I saw this many times and it's very sad. Also, I relate this to culture. Not to offend anyone, but from my personal experience lying in CV is much more common for some countries, that for others. Scale maybe terrible, like multiple certifications in some field with no actual basic knowledge or skills. Like Certified Senior (sic!) Software Developer who can't tell you difference between stack and queue, or CCIE certified network engineer who has no idea what is DNS and how it works (real case).
    - donald123 8y ago
      And what makes it different for those people without anonymous recruiting?
- coldcode 8y ago
  As soon as I walk in the door I will be eliminated. But how can you interview someone without actually seeing/talking with them? Slack? Would anyone hire based only on a Slack interview?
  - 8y ago
JohnWilcox 8y ago
Does it really not bother anyone else that we are heading down a rather dystopian world of a kind of hyper-meritocracy that eschews with all other rights and privileges as it commoditizes humans to nothing but a function of their skills and abilities as put on paper, or even exhibited in practice? It does not seem all that healthy to just dismiss and ignore and totally negate compounding value of cross-generational achievements and accomplishments ... that you are not better than the last widget you created compared to the next person you are compared in preparation for creation of the next widget. Does anyone else realize this is really just a sneaky way of introducing the degenerate nature of communism into the equation? ... that your humanity means nothing if you are not a featureless and characterless humanoid with zero of your own "biases" that contributes to the hive mind collective. I really don't think people have thought this thing through and the ways in which it can go wildly out of control once edge cases start gripping. So you are hiring totally blindly, without consideration for anything but merits ... it doesn't matter that you are a Native Fin and your competitor None of that seems remotely healthy or sane to me, and really just smacks of the idealistic and self-deluding narrow view of the effete and decadent who live sheltered in a bubble, without any fear of their own replaceability (whether rightful or not), let alone possessing event the remotest understanding for the wider consequences of their actions and outcomes, even fore themselves, if that bubble were to burst. This type of technocratic and authoritarian mentality that somehow you can inhumanely simply strip humans of their humanity in order to craft a perfect specimen of humans, ideally in their minds, a mixed master race devoid of "bias" and therefore devoid of their humanity; is really a rather detestable and clearly inhumane ideology by its inherent characteristics.
- rendall 8y ago
  That's an interesting perspective! So you believe that one's race or gender or age should be a factor in predicting whether an applicant will be a good fit for a particular role?
  - core-questions 8y ago
    I think this is a loaded statement. While there are, in fact, statistically proven differences for all three of those facets, the greater thrust that the OP was making seems to be that we are forced to dehumanize ourselves and others in service of an effort toward forced equalization, and that it feels very Orwellian.
funkythings 8y ago
This will backfire, as in previous experiments: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-trial-to-improve-gender-equality-failing-study/8664888 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-tria...
adontz 8y ago
To me it seems counterproductive. Either whoever lies in CV more will win (be interviewed at least), or bias will show itself during personal interviews. You can't look at a person without realizing sex/age/race.
- Spearchucker 8y ago
  Of course you're going to know who you're interviewing. The whole idea is to anonymize the PRE-interview phase, specifically, selecting candidates. That selection post excludes personally identifying information. If someone lies on their CV and is caught out another/more candidates will be chosen to interview, no?
  - adontz 8y ago
    >> If someone lies on their CV and is caught out another/more candidates will be chosen to interview, no? Not really. Imagine three candidates: A, B and C. A is much better as professional, but B is good enough and has much better CV, C is trash but with great CV. If you interview B and C, you will hire B and never call A. Not optimal. If B is not good enough, you will hire A, but also waste time. If I know that B or C is from culture where lie is more common I will adjust my expectations and call A and B or C, but A will be included. Actually I believe that some statistically proven bias is healthy thing. I conducted many interviews and I can say the following: 1) People tend to lie in CV in very specific patterns. By just reading CV, even with name and age hidden I can guess sex and age relatively easy. Not 100%, but much better than 50%. 2) Everybody lies (c) House M.D. Really, everyone. But different people lie differently, because different things are important to them and they want to look better at different things. I simply saw that many times. By knowing personal details I may adjust what I see in CV to get much more realistic picture. This is bias, yes, it is. But what can I do? Ask them not to lie? Real life does not work like that. 3) I will not, for instance, hire someone of significantly different hygiene standards. Has nothing to do with CV.
  - nemo44x 8y ago
    > That selection post excludes personally identifying information. Here's the cognitive dissonance of it all. How can we achieve the goal of a "diverse" workplace (which is based on certain attributes like gender, race, age, etc) when we can't select a candidate pool with these things taken into consideration? Will this have a net negative effect on at least creating an equal opportunity? I'm not saying I'm for or against this blind screening. But I am skeptical it will work as intended. If anything, those with the most advantage due to their socioeconomic status from birth will simply advance in the system even more quickly.
Z1515M8147 8y ago
I hire on anonymized data. I can tell you that it works well. The only flaw is that if your pool of application sifters is not diverse, bias will start to creep back in. For instance, in a group of several application sifters of a single gender who are collectively deciding which applications to progress to interview stage, one may frequently encounter presumptions of gender and age of the applicants due to implicit bias by the sifters. The organisation must have a very respectful culture in which colleagues feel comfortable calling out others on their biases when this happens.
- gammateam 8y ago
  "ooooh this person has MIT/Stanford/Harvard on their resume, just like I do!" "eh, midwestern state school" "what even is an HBCU are those accredited?" "fortran though?" the initiatives are at least conscious of sensitivities in the space, but we have a long way to go
proxygeek 8y ago
Recently I've been thinking about inherent biased towards applicants based on their prior work / educational history, in terms of organizations they have been to. I get that it acts as a moderate signal of how tenacious and inherently able that applicant might have been in the past if she went to XYZ school or ABC company. But there will be so many false negatives! A lot of folks who probably would be otherwise capable of the job at hand would be dismissed for not having the right pedigree. Also, past performance is not always the best Intuit if future success. And then of course is the issue of how do you even define success, especially in case if university graduates. How does a Yale or Harvard define our measure success for its students... Probably in terms of potential impact they have on the world or how good their names may look on the rolls 10 years down the line. A lot of the issues, especially in terms of job applicators but also applicable in admissions process, ultimately comes down to information and numeric asymmetry between the organisation and the applicant. If there was a way to somehow capture the readings - however brief - for rejection or selection of applicants or a documented scoring methodology, that itself would bring a lot of change. I would love to know if some resources to further explore the alternative models of applicant assessment which does not place as much importance on the past organisations / schools they have been to. Any suggestions would be much appreciated
- screaminghawk 8y ago
  I completely agree with this. The problem with bias is that it has affected peoples opportunities in the past. This will be reflected in a CV. I'm not sure the inclusion of name / age / etc will solve this problem, so Helsinki might still be on the right track. It feels like the solution is to intentionally introduce a reverse bias towards these candidates. But that idea does sit well... Also interested in any other suggestions here.
  - __Joker 8y ago
    Yes, The other information is a job application, at least you can argue that somebody could make a decision based on those information. Whether decision process is just is obviously arguable. If name, age is totally irrelevant to a job, at best it will not be used for selection, while there is much risk that it will be used for discrimination consciously or not.
komali2 8y ago
Recently was using coderpad, I believe, and after the session ended it had an advertisement for some similar scheme - a blind technical interview (with Uber, Lyft, or Facebook! it advertised) that, if you do well in, you can choose to "unmask." Was thinking about doing it, anybody else tried it? Probably would be disadvantageous to me - I generally pitch myself as a moderately skilled engineer with very good soft skills, as opposed to a tremendously skilled engineer straight up (maybe in a couple years...). Can't demonstrate soft skills anonymously.
- klohto 8y ago
  I’d like to think I’m more skilled in soft skills than others but I always demonstrate that at the on-site interviews. How do you market those skills on a resume?
  - komali2 8y ago
    Well, like this: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1A3Ns93sbE8v70hCt7yWJigoiL0sQZNTtMPr9zVtkoqM/ https://docs.google.com/document/d/1A3Ns93sbE8v70hCt7yWJigoi... Best I think I can do is certain descriptions for projects highlighting my role, as well as stick a little section at the bottom describing a personal experience and showing a bit of my personality and value system. Stuff like "Led hackathon team of 4 to develop a serverless app integrating several APIs." It's really quite tricky to show off your soft skills on your resume. I think the resume should be more to just get your foot in the door. If I can get on the phone, I'm usually good to go.
    - klohto 8y ago
      Based on your resume, I think you can present all of these skills anonymously as well. Of course, there might some clear marks that will give away your gender and age, but that's up-to the interviewer to decide. All the things you have on your resume can be done by a woman or 20-year old as well as 60-year old. So, I don't this would hurt you in any way and you can still demonstrate your soft skills.
Derek_MK 8y ago
> “A key challenge is that when much of the information in the application has been hidden, it’s hard to establish a clear picture of the know-how and capability of the applicant,” the city’s resolution says. What exactly do you learn about a candidate's know-how and capability by knowing their name, gender, etc? Unless you are so deep in denial that you'd just blatantly say "Men are more capable than women".
- pishpash 8y ago
  Depends on what's considered identifying information. There is Google you know. But I applaud the concept. I'd be interested in the results.
pishpash 8y ago
Now if they do what paper submissions do in academia and also require you to discloser 1st and 2nd degree conflicts of interest.
tomrod 8y ago
Economist here. This will bake in bias that affirmative action and other programs seek to counter. Inequality of opportunity unfortunately isn't countered by this approach. Why? The same group(s) facing discrimination at the employment point also face discrimination earlier in life, or have baked in social discrimination (such as the US justice system overpenalizing blacks relative to whites/Asians, or Ivy League admission rates for Asians versus other groups). It would be nice to build a group-blind world, and the more we adopt these specific approaches the better can can iterate towards. However, care should be taken to ensure the baked in biases don't further entrench.
- Aqua 8y ago
  I'm sorry, but this sounds absurd. Correct me if I'm wrong, but what you're saying implies that employers should hire people that are less qualified for a job just because they belong to a group, members of which on average are more likely to be discriminated earlier in their lives than others? Engineer here, and no, blind hiring will not bake-in any biases, because that's exactly the problem this approach solves - it aims to hire the best candidates regardless of their race, origin, religion, accent and other irrelevant characteristics.
  - tomrod 8y ago
    My first paragraph I tried very carefully to avoid normative/"should" statements. The identification of the issue is at hand. Consider Computer Science. Historically far fewer women go through the training for a variety of personal reasons and societal pressure. So, on the margin, blind/anonymous hiring ignores that upstream delta between females in population and skilled females in hiring pool. Whether this is desirable or not is not my point, only that this is "baked in bias" perpetuating down the line. It's noble to build a society where we value blindness on characteristics irrelevant to hiring. Doing it piecemeal can result in furthering these baked in biases. A better approach would be to split the skills validation (blind) from the move-forward decision (adhering to whatever inter-generational correction schema the society has decided upon) where the only pool of eligible move-forwards meet the established skills validation. In this way, you only get skilled candidates, and you can satisfy whatever other characteristics that need satisfaction.
lucb1e 8y ago
> the name, date of birth, address, mother’s tongue, gender and any other personal information [are] not included [...] > when much of the information in the application has been hidden, it’s hard to establish a clear picture of the know-how and capability of the applicant So they base their assessment of know-how and capabilities on age, gender, mother's tongue, and other personal information that has been hidden? I feel like I must reading this wrong.
- dcole2929 8y ago
  I don't think you are reading that wrong. People use all sort of pseudo science to make inferences on people's competencies. Like if you are a woman in a male dominated field you're likely to be highly competent. Or when hiring for a leadership position an older candidate may be subconsciously preferred over a younger one with more experience. It's all generally bunk and this is imo, an admission that they have been using the wrong criteria to judge candidates.
  - Fomite 8y ago
    See also: If your mother's tongue isn't also the local native/dominant language, you must be an immigrant, which may be positive or negative depending on the circumstance.
  - lucb1e 8y ago
    > if you are a woman in a male dominated field you're likely to be highly competent In my experience it's the opposite. Like with small countries: the odds they produce someone extremely good at a certain sport is just smaller than in large countries, so large countries are more likely to win some world cup or the Olympics. I know only a handful of women in IT to begin with, but most of them aren't great at it. But that's not your point. You're saying that there are biases in hiring, and I agree. What I'm surprised by is that the article quotes them saying that they now find it very hard to judge someone. Who would say, alongside a press release about anonymous applications, that they find it difficult to base their judgement solely on only relevant information?
black-tea 8y ago
Great. This should stop the "wage gap" arguments. It will mean even fewer women in tech, but apparently that's what they want.
- emiliobumachar 8y ago
  Affirmative action could be made compatible with anonymous recruiting. Set up a point system. After all the subjective points are set in stone, unmask the applicant and apply any modifiers.
  - fhbdukfrh 8y ago
    So the worst of both worlds? You're trying to both eliminate irrelevant bias and emphasize it. Your result will be "we hire the least white, white males"
    - tomrod 8y ago
      Depending on the legal criteria (if quotas) decided by society, that could be true. It could not. It really comes down to implementation (of which "doing nothing"/autarky is one choice).
ranprieur 8y ago
If employers are looking for a radical utopian reform, I'd rather see them do away with the interview. Interviews slant hiring toward personal charm, and toward the cultural uniformity of the workplace, at the expense of competence.
- justfor1comment 8y ago
  We need the same set up that the Turing Test has during interviews to remove the factors you enlisted.
  - tomrod 8y ago
    Something like a civil service exam?
- jVinc 8y ago
  Which is both the objective and a net positive for the workplace. I get that everyone who's bad at interviews want to do away with them. But you could likely find charming individuals who want to do away with technical requirements because they feel their great personality is more important than what their gradepoint average was. Neither of those groups are right to discard the "other side" of the equation. You need both, and hiring blindly based strictly for technical competence will have you feeling like you're managing a daycare center. Trust me, the interview is not a problem.
- asdff 8y ago
  Interviews are valuable. Being able to communicate effectively about your work, especially to a stranger, is competence. Going off of pure resume and cover letter fluff, lots of candidates can clearly do the job, but only in the interview do you see if a candidate can confidently leverage their experiences to solve new problems. If you want an interview to favor a higher level of competence, do away with the hiring managers. Have candidates interviewed by their equally titled peers, or members of the group the candidate would be working most closely with. People who not only have a technical background, but an understanding of how the specific job actually works day to day.
manigandham 8y ago
The problem is you think you can judge who is repressed, usually based on group identity, but that never ends well. Life isn't fair, some will be rich. Judging by capabilities means that anyone can learn to do the job well, even if they have to work harder to overcome their circumstances, and it'll always be down to the individual. People move between classes all the time, and in the US you'll see many people going in both directions.
- ianleeclark 8y ago
  > The problem is you think you can judge who is repressed, usually based on group identity, but that never ends well. https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/research-and-publications/research-publications/2017/20171114_Demographics.pdf https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/research-and-pu... "Black male offenders received sentences on average 19.1 percent longer than similarly situated White male offenders during the Post-Report period (fiscal years 2012-2016), as they had for the prior four periods studied." The concept of legacy admissions to Ivy League schools alone. https://www.economist.com/special-report/2004/12/29/ever-higher-society-ever-harder-to-ascend?story_id=3518560 https://www.economist.com/special-report/2004/12/29/ever-hig... It turns out that we can, in fact, make general statements about large populations. > Judging by capabilities means that anyone can learn to do the job well, even if they have to work harder to overcome their circumstances, and it'll always be down to the individual. Prove to me that free will exists and that generally humans are capable of exercising free will.
  - manigandham 8y ago
    It seems you just proved my point. Wouldn't it be great if we could finally remove demographic physical characteristics from judgement so these biases from race and legacy are gone? >> Prove to me that free will exists and that generally humans are capable of exercising free will. ...What?
    - ianleeclark 8y ago
      > Wouldn't it be great if we could finally remove demographic physical characteristics from judgement so these biases from race and legacy are gone? Why do you think that the biases from both race and legacy aren't still there whenever an applicant is effectively just a number tied to a varying skill set?
biztos 8y ago
So you remove bias from the resume-screening process and then do exactly what during the interview process?
emilfihlman 8y ago
I'll just laugh when it ends up being majority of white males, simply because that's what there are mostly available. Perhaps it'll finally shut the patriarchy blaming people up.
- Mirioron 8y ago
  It's Helsinki. It's impossible for the majority not to be white, whether they're male is another matter though.
golemiprague 8y ago
I think this will only increase discrimination rather than decrease it. The less data people have about someone the more they will use their prejudices to judge them and will focus more on those subtle differences to get clues which will affect their decision. For example, let's say the name and gender doesn't appear on the resume so you can't have a feel to the origin of the person. You will still be curious to know it even more. So you will look deeper into the text to look for any hints of language usage patterns . This will just deepen your investment into finding not so relevant differences even more and reenforce those prejudices when confirmed once the applicant comes to the interview. It might be a good idea for screening for players in the philharmonic orchestra where you can test them behind a curtain and don't really need any human interaction, but for most jobs you will meet the person eventually, so it will just cause more damage.
darkhorn 8y ago
Like in Turkey. I gues more than half of the Turkish civil servants are recruited via tests/exams, and then randomly selected via computer. Here 37000 teachers are selected randomly via a software https://youtu.be/vwYjqp_aNak https://youtu.be/vwYjqp_aNak
Traubenfuchs 8y ago
As a tall, handsome young white man with a great employment history at internationally known companies I do not like this at all. There is no perceivable bias that would penalise me, besides the fact that I do not fulfil diversity quotas... Or do I? I am not straight! I really am the full package.
- fake-name 8y ago
  Soooooo..., you're angry you no longer will get a illegitimate boost in front of your peers? Can you hear that? It's the sound of the worlds tiniest violin playing you a sad song.
  - Traubenfuchs 8y ago
    I am not angry, but I do not support changes to hiring practices that are bad for me.
- 706f6f70 8y ago
  Come to Canada, you will be penalized so hard you'll wish the public health care system covered pre-crisis mental health. The good news is that because gender is a social construct, no one can challenge your assertion that you are in fact non-binary. Religion is the same. Verdict is still out on race however.
someguy1444 8y ago
This could be a form of discrimination against native born applicants. A person's "mother tongue" is not some trivial matter. Many Indians I've worked with are not as fluent in English as they claim to be. Communication skills matter. Trying to even the playing field so that people who are not native speakers of the local language is ridiculous. I have worked hard to improve my own communication skills and consider it a very valuable skill when searching for employment.
- asdff 8y ago
  Communication skills are tested in the interview.
umichguy 8y ago
The UK Civil Service already does this. They ask you to remove all PII, school/ university names. That said you can leave your previous employer names in it. They call it "name-blind" recruitment.

196 points by rendall 8y ago

This had been tried before, and it failed spectacularly. Women did even worse. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-trial-to-improve-gender-equality-failing-study/8664888 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-tri...

saintPirelli 8y ago
They will replicate the results, quietly implement a different protocol and never talk about it again for sure.
mamon 8y ago
This matches my experience in IT: sometimes recruiters prefer to hire a girl, even if less qualified, just for sake of having a girl in the team, because it is "improving the morale" :)
- deelowe 8y ago
  There are tons of studies out there showing monocultures are bad for business. In your case, I'm sure your IT department had to interact with women on occasion. Having women on the team will allow the group to be aware of social considerations specific to women that they may otherwise miss. The people who reviewed and approved the designs for our office space were all males. Guess what they forgot to put in the women's restrooms? When women complained, they put an open trash can next to the toilet with no lid... The problem with the whole conversation around this topic is everyone pretending that women and men on average have the same level of skills and experience as each other. Then they act shocked when there are so few qualified male nurses or female mechanics. Businesses only care about this topic, because it helps them design products and provide services that address a wider market. So, maybe they should just admit they don't always hire the absolute technically best candidate as the goal is to improve the social structure of the team.
  - klohto 8y ago
    Thank you. I have never considered this view. I always hear it’s for the team’s good to be more diverse but never why it’s good to be diverse... I still believe quotas should not be applied everywhere but your example shows an excellent point that they are beneficial in some cases.
- roberto 8y ago
  Do they also hire "boys"? I think the term you're looking for is "women".
deleted 8y ago
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bduerst 8y ago
Where are the results of this Australian study? That news article doesn't list them. Following through on their source [1], it says that the study outcome actually favors women and minority candidates, but it doesn't say how much, or talk about statistical signifance. It seems like the experiment design has been criticized on this one study too, and not releasing the results seems suspect. The study also cites that blind auditions were a success for Orchestras [2]: >In a well-known study analysing data on auditions and hiring by orchestras over this period, Goldin & Rouse (2000) found that the use of blind auditions had a major impact on gender bias in orchestras, increasing the likelihood of female musicians being selected by 25-40%. [1] http://behaviouraleconomics.pmc.gov.au/projects/going-blind-see-more-clearly-unconscious-bias-australian-public-service-aps-shortlisting http://behaviouraleconomics.pmc.gov.au/projects/going-blind-... [2] https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.90.4.715 https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.90.4.715
- fiestaman 8y ago
  The study states that after anonymization of resumes women were around 3% less likely to get picked and men around 3% more likely. Data were statistically significant at the 99% level. http://behaviouraleconomics.pmc.gov.au/sites/default/files/projects/unconscious-bias.pdf http://behaviouraleconomics.pmc.gov.au/sites/default/files/p... Page 13
tomp 8y ago
Don't you mean, succeeded spectacularly? If the composition of candidates was changed when less biased/irrelevant information was displayed, arguably the selection could only be more meritocratic, not less.
- Fomite 8y ago
  That is only true assuming the selection criteria that weren't blinded were themselves free of bias. That's very rarely true. And if it's not true, arguably what you've done is removed the adjustment variables that could correct the bias, rather than the bias itself.
  - 706f6f70 8y ago
    > were themselves free of bias. At what point do we start growing people solely for the purpose of leading unbiased existences away from all of humanity? Of course these existences are isolated from all humanity lest they associate the human that gives them food with positivity, or someone having a bad day with negativity. And of course, we kill these unbiaseds shortly after every selection process, since the mere process of selection itself, generates bias. Some SF writer must have beaten me to this right?
    - Fomite 8y ago
      Note that, like many machine learning examples of the recent past, the evaluator themselves need not be biased. Just the data.
- black-tea 8y ago
  Failed because this kind of thing is always done for feminism. It's not done to get closer to a meritocracy.
deleted 8y ago
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manigandham 8y ago
Failed at what exactly? >> The trial found assigning a male name to a candidate made them 3.2 per cent less likely to get a job interview. Adding a woman's name to a CV made the candidate 2.9 per cent more likely to get a foot in the door. Seems like it did the job of removing existing bias when details were blind.

hardwaresofton 8y ago

I've long suspected this was the only remotely feasible way to remove bias from recruiting (and possibly interviewing itself) -- I'm interested to see how this will go. Politics about bias and diversity aside, if your goal was to objectively disable people from being biased, the simplest solution always seemed to be to remove their ability to apply any of their biases.

scarmig 8y ago
I wonder how far it goes. In the USA, there are universities that have very distinctive ethnic compositions: UC Irvine is very different from Howard is very different from BYU. Do they anonymize the university name as well? Perhaps translating it to "large research university" and "liberal arts college." Though probably you can get some signals from there as well.
- paulie_a 8y ago
  Personally I've never understood the importance put on degrees in the tech field. Sure it is important for your first job, but after 2 years, who cares. When reviewing resumes, if the person has been in the industry for a bit, the degree is irrelevant. And the fancy expensive school, big whoop. I rarely even read that section. I only care about their recent accomplishments and hopefully they have a good number of past ones.
  - turtlecloud 8y ago
    Because of compounding effects of good habits staring in high school that consequently lead to going to a good school.
    - paulie_a 8y ago
      They could have gone to a community college or Stanford, or been a college drop out. It's not going to sway me. What have you accomplished and will you become a productive and good person to work with is all that matters.

dullgiulio 8y ago

Quite interesting how such a thing affects salaries as all yearly personal incomes data is public in Finland.

walshemj 8y ago
Always how they got away with that with the Eu's Data Protection laws and now GPDR. Do I have an overriding "need" to know what my neighbour is earning and its certainly open to abuse eg other UK media organisations using it as a stick to beat the BBC with.

hirundo 8y ago

> Anonymous recruiting entails that the ... date of birth ... are not included in the job application If I write on my application that I have 25 years of experience, does that have to be excluded due to it revealing that my date of birth is likely more than 40 years ago? Can they really believe that the amount of experience isn't important?

scarmig 8y ago
To be fair, the hiring signal you can get from a description of 25 years of experience is probably comparable to the signal you can get from a description of the most recent 5 or maybe 10 years of experience.
caymanjim 8y ago
I'm 46, and people my age talk about leaving off earlier experience, so as not to look too old. I condensed my earlier experience (the first 10 years) into a couple sentences describing the roles--not to look younger, but because with an average stint of 2.5 years, there are just too many jobs to list. Other steps people my age take are to stop listing dates--either select dates like university graduation, or--in extreme cases--all employment dates. Keep in mind that there are different biases at different screening points along the way. The manager with the open position may want someone older and more experienced, but the people recruiting, screening, and filtering the candidates may be biased or simply not familiar with the value of experience that doesn't match today's buzzwords.
- CGamesPlay 8y ago
  I've got about 14 years of development experience and I also leave off some of my earlier experience on my resume. I do it not to conceal my age, but because the stuff I was doing 10 years ago is so much less interesting and relevant to my applications today. Does my outlook not resonate with you/other older employees?
  - caymanjim 8y ago
    It does with me, but I'm less picky about traditional experience than most people. I'd prefer a list of technologies that someone knows, a list of things they want to work on, and a blurb about how they might fit in to the role I'm hiring for. The cover letter seems to have fallen out of fashion, but I find a couple paragraphs of prose far more revealing about a person's abilities than a resume. Of course it's also more work to craft one for every position you're interested in, and doesn't help much if you're looking to put yourself into a database for recruiters (e.g. LinkedIn or any other job site), where they force you to iterate your experience in chronological order and list technologies with no context. I think it's important to leave off things you're not interested in. I did Perl for years but there is no amount of money that would get me to do it again, so I minimize or eliminate its presence on my resume, and put extra emphasis on the technologies I want to work with now.

jeffbarg 8y ago

The most shocking part of this to me is the last line: "The City of Helsinki is Finland’s biggest employer with around 38,000 employees." Is this common for governmental organizations to be such large employers? Even in Europe, this is surprising to me.

Tuna-Fish 8y ago
Finland has a national health care system where most health care workers work for the municipalities. Add to that teachers, social workers and that covers most of it.
fipple 8y ago
Yes, the federal government is the US’s largest employer.
ed_balls 8y ago
NHS (Great Britain - state owned health provider) is on a track to reach 2mln employees.
- gaius 8y ago
  Precious few of them nurses but there’s always room on the org chart for more middle managers.
jahaja 8y ago
I think so. 39,000 in Stockholm. http://www.stockholm.se/OmStockholm/Forvaltningar-och-bolag/ http://www.stockholm.se/OmStockholm/Forvaltningar-och-bolag/
dudul 8y ago
The US Department of Defense is literally the biggest employer in the world. 38,000 for a capital city in a country with real health care, public schools and developed public services is not that much.
cafard 8y ago
Washington, DC, reports 36 thousand FTE for this fiscal year.

mms1973 8y ago

What about doing the same for politicians running for office? show us your "accomplishments", we don't care about the rest, LOL.

Haitischmock 8y ago

People are going to fake a lot more degrees and other qualifications. When they come in for an in-person interview racial/gender/age/whatever bias is still going to be there. Only way to prevent this would be to forbid in-person interviews before hiring/signing a conract, but then companies would presumably simply stop hiring from applications, because the qualifications are unreliable and they can't get a character impression of the applicant. Hiring by reference from existing employees would become the norm (maybe it already is).

donald123 8y ago
Why would someone do that if they know the faked degrees or qualifications won't pass the background check eventually? Just to get an onsite interview?
- adontz 8y ago
  Yes, just to get an onsite interview. I saw this many times and it's very sad. Also, I relate this to culture. Not to offend anyone, but from my personal experience lying in CV is much more common for some countries, that for others. Scale maybe terrible, like multiple certifications in some field with no actual basic knowledge or skills. Like Certified Senior (sic!) Software Developer who can't tell you difference between stack and queue, or CCIE certified network engineer who has no idea what is DNS and how it works (real case).
  - donald123 8y ago
    And what makes it different for those people without anonymous recruiting?
coldcode 8y ago
As soon as I walk in the door I will be eliminated. But how can you interview someone without actually seeing/talking with them? Slack? Would anyone hire based only on a Slack interview?
- 8y ago

JohnWilcox 8y ago

Does it really not bother anyone else that we are heading down a rather dystopian world of a kind of hyper-meritocracy that eschews with all other rights and privileges as it commoditizes humans to nothing but a function of their skills and abilities as put on paper, or even exhibited in practice? It does not seem all that healthy to just dismiss and ignore and totally negate compounding value of cross-generational achievements and accomplishments ... that you are not better than the last widget you created compared to the next person you are compared in preparation for creation of the next widget. Does anyone else realize this is really just a sneaky way of introducing the degenerate nature of communism into the equation? ... that your humanity means nothing if you are not a featureless and characterless humanoid with zero of your own "biases" that contributes to the hive mind collective. I really don't think people have thought this thing through and the ways in which it can go wildly out of control once edge cases start gripping. So you are hiring totally blindly, without consideration for anything but merits ... it doesn't matter that you are a Native Fin and your competitor None of that seems remotely healthy or sane to me, and really just smacks of the idealistic and self-deluding narrow view of the effete and decadent who live sheltered in a bubble, without any fear of their own replaceability (whether rightful or not), let alone possessing event the remotest understanding for the wider consequences of their actions and outcomes, even fore themselves, if that bubble were to burst. This type of technocratic and authoritarian mentality that somehow you can inhumanely simply strip humans of their humanity in order to craft a perfect specimen of humans, ideally in their minds, a mixed master race devoid of "bias" and therefore devoid of their humanity; is really a rather detestable and clearly inhumane ideology by its inherent characteristics.

rendall 8y ago
That's an interesting perspective! So you believe that one's race or gender or age should be a factor in predicting whether an applicant will be a good fit for a particular role?
- core-questions 8y ago
  I think this is a loaded statement. While there are, in fact, statistically proven differences for all three of those facets, the greater thrust that the OP was making seems to be that we are forced to dehumanize ourselves and others in service of an effort toward forced equalization, and that it feels very Orwellian.

funkythings 8y ago

This will backfire, as in previous experiments: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-trial-to-improve-gender-equality-failing-study/8664888 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-tria...

adontz 8y ago

To me it seems counterproductive. Either whoever lies in CV more will win (be interviewed at least), or bias will show itself during personal interviews. You can't look at a person without realizing sex/age/race.

Spearchucker 8y ago
Of course you're going to know who you're interviewing. The whole idea is to anonymize the PRE-interview phase, specifically, selecting candidates. That selection post excludes personally identifying information. If someone lies on their CV and is caught out another/more candidates will be chosen to interview, no?
- adontz 8y ago
  >> If someone lies on their CV and is caught out another/more candidates will be chosen to interview, no? Not really. Imagine three candidates: A, B and C. A is much better as professional, but B is good enough and has much better CV, C is trash but with great CV. If you interview B and C, you will hire B and never call A. Not optimal. If B is not good enough, you will hire A, but also waste time. If I know that B or C is from culture where lie is more common I will adjust my expectations and call A and B or C, but A will be included. Actually I believe that some statistically proven bias is healthy thing. I conducted many interviews and I can say the following: 1) People tend to lie in CV in very specific patterns. By just reading CV, even with name and age hidden I can guess sex and age relatively easy. Not 100%, but much better than 50%. 2) Everybody lies (c) House M.D. Really, everyone. But different people lie differently, because different things are important to them and they want to look better at different things. I simply saw that many times. By knowing personal details I may adjust what I see in CV to get much more realistic picture. This is bias, yes, it is. But what can I do? Ask them not to lie? Real life does not work like that. 3) I will not, for instance, hire someone of significantly different hygiene standards. Has nothing to do with CV.
- nemo44x 8y ago
  > That selection post excludes personally identifying information. Here's the cognitive dissonance of it all. How can we achieve the goal of a "diverse" workplace (which is based on certain attributes like gender, race, age, etc) when we can't select a candidate pool with these things taken into consideration? Will this have a net negative effect on at least creating an equal opportunity? I'm not saying I'm for or against this blind screening. But I am skeptical it will work as intended. If anything, those with the most advantage due to their socioeconomic status from birth will simply advance in the system even more quickly.

Z1515M8147 8y ago

I hire on anonymized data. I can tell you that it works well. The only flaw is that if your pool of application sifters is not diverse, bias will start to creep back in. For instance, in a group of several application sifters of a single gender who are collectively deciding which applications to progress to interview stage, one may frequently encounter presumptions of gender and age of the applicants due to implicit bias by the sifters. The organisation must have a very respectful culture in which colleagues feel comfortable calling out others on their biases when this happens.

gammateam 8y ago
"ooooh this person has MIT/Stanford/Harvard on their resume, just like I do!" "eh, midwestern state school" "what even is an HBCU are those accredited?" "fortran though?" the initiatives are at least conscious of sensitivities in the space, but we have a long way to go

proxygeek 8y ago

Recently I've been thinking about inherent biased towards applicants based on their prior work / educational history, in terms of organizations they have been to. I get that it acts as a moderate signal of how tenacious and inherently able that applicant might have been in the past if she went to XYZ school or ABC company. But there will be so many false negatives! A lot of folks who probably would be otherwise capable of the job at hand would be dismissed for not having the right pedigree. Also, past performance is not always the best Intuit if future success. And then of course is the issue of how do you even define success, especially in case if university graduates. How does a Yale or Harvard define our measure success for its students... Probably in terms of potential impact they have on the world or how good their names may look on the rolls 10 years down the line. A lot of the issues, especially in terms of job applicators but also applicable in admissions process, ultimately comes down to information and numeric asymmetry between the organisation and the applicant. If there was a way to somehow capture the readings - however brief - for rejection or selection of applicants or a documented scoring methodology, that itself would bring a lot of change. I would love to know if some resources to further explore the alternative models of applicant assessment which does not place as much importance on the past organisations / schools they have been to. Any suggestions would be much appreciated

screaminghawk 8y ago
I completely agree with this. The problem with bias is that it has affected peoples opportunities in the past. This will be reflected in a CV. I'm not sure the inclusion of name / age / etc will solve this problem, so Helsinki might still be on the right track. It feels like the solution is to intentionally introduce a reverse bias towards these candidates. But that idea does sit well... Also interested in any other suggestions here.
- __Joker 8y ago
  Yes, The other information is a job application, at least you can argue that somebody could make a decision based on those information. Whether decision process is just is obviously arguable. If name, age is totally irrelevant to a job, at best it will not be used for selection, while there is much risk that it will be used for discrimination consciously or not.

komali2 8y ago

Recently was using coderpad, I believe, and after the session ended it had an advertisement for some similar scheme - a blind technical interview (with Uber, Lyft, or Facebook! it advertised) that, if you do well in, you can choose to "unmask." Was thinking about doing it, anybody else tried it? Probably would be disadvantageous to me - I generally pitch myself as a moderately skilled engineer with very good soft skills, as opposed to a tremendously skilled engineer straight up (maybe in a couple years...). Can't demonstrate soft skills anonymously.

klohto 8y ago
I’d like to think I’m more skilled in soft skills than others but I always demonstrate that at the on-site interviews. How do you market those skills on a resume?
- komali2 8y ago
  Well, like this: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1A3Ns93sbE8v70hCt7yWJigoiL0sQZNTtMPr9zVtkoqM/ https://docs.google.com/document/d/1A3Ns93sbE8v70hCt7yWJigoi... Best I think I can do is certain descriptions for projects highlighting my role, as well as stick a little section at the bottom describing a personal experience and showing a bit of my personality and value system. Stuff like "Led hackathon team of 4 to develop a serverless app integrating several APIs." It's really quite tricky to show off your soft skills on your resume. I think the resume should be more to just get your foot in the door. If I can get on the phone, I'm usually good to go.
  - klohto 8y ago
    Based on your resume, I think you can present all of these skills anonymously as well. Of course, there might some clear marks that will give away your gender and age, but that's up-to the interviewer to decide. All the things you have on your resume can be done by a woman or 20-year old as well as 60-year old. So, I don't this would hurt you in any way and you can still demonstrate your soft skills.

Derek_MK 8y ago

> “A key challenge is that when much of the information in the application has been hidden, it’s hard to establish a clear picture of the know-how and capability of the applicant,” the city’s resolution says. What exactly do you learn about a candidate's know-how and capability by knowing their name, gender, etc? Unless you are so deep in denial that you'd just blatantly say "Men are more capable than women".

pishpash 8y ago
Depends on what's considered identifying information. There is Google you know. But I applaud the concept. I'd be interested in the results.

pishpash 8y ago

Now if they do what paper submissions do in academia and also require you to discloser 1st and 2nd degree conflicts of interest.

tomrod 8y ago

Economist here. This will bake in bias that affirmative action and other programs seek to counter. Inequality of opportunity unfortunately isn't countered by this approach. Why? The same group(s) facing discrimination at the employment point also face discrimination earlier in life, or have baked in social discrimination (such as the US justice system overpenalizing blacks relative to whites/Asians, or Ivy League admission rates for Asians versus other groups). It would be nice to build a group-blind world, and the more we adopt these specific approaches the better can can iterate towards. However, care should be taken to ensure the baked in biases don't further entrench.

Aqua 8y ago
I'm sorry, but this sounds absurd. Correct me if I'm wrong, but what you're saying implies that employers should hire people that are less qualified for a job just because they belong to a group, members of which on average are more likely to be discriminated earlier in their lives than others? Engineer here, and no, blind hiring will not bake-in any biases, because that's exactly the problem this approach solves - it aims to hire the best candidates regardless of their race, origin, religion, accent and other irrelevant characteristics.
- tomrod 8y ago
  My first paragraph I tried very carefully to avoid normative/"should" statements. The identification of the issue is at hand. Consider Computer Science. Historically far fewer women go through the training for a variety of personal reasons and societal pressure. So, on the margin, blind/anonymous hiring ignores that upstream delta between females in population and skilled females in hiring pool. Whether this is desirable or not is not my point, only that this is "baked in bias" perpetuating down the line. It's noble to build a society where we value blindness on characteristics irrelevant to hiring. Doing it piecemeal can result in furthering these baked in biases. A better approach would be to split the skills validation (blind) from the move-forward decision (adhering to whatever inter-generational correction schema the society has decided upon) where the only pool of eligible move-forwards meet the established skills validation. In this way, you only get skilled candidates, and you can satisfy whatever other characteristics that need satisfaction.

lucb1e 8y ago

> the name, date of birth, address, mother’s tongue, gender and any other personal information [are] not included [...] > when much of the information in the application has been hidden, it’s hard to establish a clear picture of the know-how and capability of the applicant So they base their assessment of know-how and capabilities on age, gender, mother's tongue, and other personal information that has been hidden? I feel like I must reading this wrong.

dcole2929 8y ago
I don't think you are reading that wrong. People use all sort of pseudo science to make inferences on people's competencies. Like if you are a woman in a male dominated field you're likely to be highly competent. Or when hiring for a leadership position an older candidate may be subconsciously preferred over a younger one with more experience. It's all generally bunk and this is imo, an admission that they have been using the wrong criteria to judge candidates.
- Fomite 8y ago
  See also: If your mother's tongue isn't also the local native/dominant language, you must be an immigrant, which may be positive or negative depending on the circumstance.
- lucb1e 8y ago
  > if you are a woman in a male dominated field you're likely to be highly competent In my experience it's the opposite. Like with small countries: the odds they produce someone extremely good at a certain sport is just smaller than in large countries, so large countries are more likely to win some world cup or the Olympics. I know only a handful of women in IT to begin with, but most of them aren't great at it. But that's not your point. You're saying that there are biases in hiring, and I agree. What I'm surprised by is that the article quotes them saying that they now find it very hard to judge someone. Who would say, alongside a press release about anonymous applications, that they find it difficult to base their judgement solely on only relevant information?

black-tea 8y ago

Great. This should stop the "wage gap" arguments. It will mean even fewer women in tech, but apparently that's what they want.

emiliobumachar 8y ago
Affirmative action could be made compatible with anonymous recruiting. Set up a point system. After all the subjective points are set in stone, unmask the applicant and apply any modifiers.
- fhbdukfrh 8y ago
  So the worst of both worlds? You're trying to both eliminate irrelevant bias and emphasize it. Your result will be "we hire the least white, white males"
  - tomrod 8y ago
    Depending on the legal criteria (if quotas) decided by society, that could be true. It could not. It really comes down to implementation (of which "doing nothing"/autarky is one choice).

ranprieur 8y ago

If employers are looking for a radical utopian reform, I'd rather see them do away with the interview. Interviews slant hiring toward personal charm, and toward the cultural uniformity of the workplace, at the expense of competence.

justfor1comment 8y ago
We need the same set up that the Turing Test has during interviews to remove the factors you enlisted.
- tomrod 8y ago
  Something like a civil service exam?
jVinc 8y ago
Which is both the objective and a net positive for the workplace. I get that everyone who's bad at interviews want to do away with them. But you could likely find charming individuals who want to do away with technical requirements because they feel their great personality is more important than what their gradepoint average was. Neither of those groups are right to discard the "other side" of the equation. You need both, and hiring blindly based strictly for technical competence will have you feeling like you're managing a daycare center. Trust me, the interview is not a problem.
asdff 8y ago
Interviews are valuable. Being able to communicate effectively about your work, especially to a stranger, is competence. Going off of pure resume and cover letter fluff, lots of candidates can clearly do the job, but only in the interview do you see if a candidate can confidently leverage their experiences to solve new problems. If you want an interview to favor a higher level of competence, do away with the hiring managers. Have candidates interviewed by their equally titled peers, or members of the group the candidate would be working most closely with. People who not only have a technical background, but an understanding of how the specific job actually works day to day.

manigandham 8y ago

The problem is you think you can judge who is repressed, usually based on group identity, but that never ends well. Life isn't fair, some will be rich. Judging by capabilities means that anyone can learn to do the job well, even if they have to work harder to overcome their circumstances, and it'll always be down to the individual. People move between classes all the time, and in the US you'll see many people going in both directions.

ianleeclark 8y ago
> The problem is you think you can judge who is repressed, usually based on group identity, but that never ends well. https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/research-and-publications/research-publications/2017/20171114_Demographics.pdf https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/research-and-pu... "Black male offenders received sentences on average 19.1 percent longer than similarly situated White male offenders during the Post-Report period (fiscal years 2012-2016), as they had for the prior four periods studied." The concept of legacy admissions to Ivy League schools alone. https://www.economist.com/special-report/2004/12/29/ever-higher-society-ever-harder-to-ascend?story_id=3518560 https://www.economist.com/special-report/2004/12/29/ever-hig... It turns out that we can, in fact, make general statements about large populations. > Judging by capabilities means that anyone can learn to do the job well, even if they have to work harder to overcome their circumstances, and it'll always be down to the individual. Prove to me that free will exists and that generally humans are capable of exercising free will.
- manigandham 8y ago
  It seems you just proved my point. Wouldn't it be great if we could finally remove demographic physical characteristics from judgement so these biases from race and legacy are gone? >> Prove to me that free will exists and that generally humans are capable of exercising free will. ...What?
  - ianleeclark 8y ago
    > Wouldn't it be great if we could finally remove demographic physical characteristics from judgement so these biases from race and legacy are gone? Why do you think that the biases from both race and legacy aren't still there whenever an applicant is effectively just a number tied to a varying skill set?

biztos 8y ago

So you remove bias from the resume-screening process and then do exactly what during the interview process?

emilfihlman 8y ago

I'll just laugh when it ends up being majority of white males, simply because that's what there are mostly available. Perhaps it'll finally shut the patriarchy blaming people up.

Mirioron 8y ago
It's Helsinki. It's impossible for the majority not to be white, whether they're male is another matter though.

golemiprague 8y ago

I think this will only increase discrimination rather than decrease it. The less data people have about someone the more they will use their prejudices to judge them and will focus more on those subtle differences to get clues which will affect their decision. For example, let's say the name and gender doesn't appear on the resume so you can't have a feel to the origin of the person. You will still be curious to know it even more. So you will look deeper into the text to look for any hints of language usage patterns . This will just deepen your investment into finding not so relevant differences even more and reenforce those prejudices when confirmed once the applicant comes to the interview. It might be a good idea for screening for players in the philharmonic orchestra where you can test them behind a curtain and don't really need any human interaction, but for most jobs you will meet the person eventually, so it will just cause more damage.

darkhorn 8y ago

Like in Turkey. I gues more than half of the Turkish civil servants are recruited via tests/exams, and then randomly selected via computer. Here 37000 teachers are selected randomly via a software https://youtu.be/vwYjqp_aNak https://youtu.be/vwYjqp_aNak

Traubenfuchs 8y ago

As a tall, handsome young white man with a great employment history at internationally known companies I do not like this at all. There is no perceivable bias that would penalise me, besides the fact that I do not fulfil diversity quotas... Or do I? I am not straight! I really am the full package.

fake-name 8y ago
Soooooo..., you're angry you no longer will get a illegitimate boost in front of your peers? Can you hear that? It's the sound of the worlds tiniest violin playing you a sad song.
- Traubenfuchs 8y ago
  I am not angry, but I do not support changes to hiring practices that are bad for me.
706f6f70 8y ago
Come to Canada, you will be penalized so hard you'll wish the public health care system covered pre-crisis mental health. The good news is that because gender is a social construct, no one can challenge your assertion that you are in fact non-binary. Religion is the same. Verdict is still out on race however.

someguy1444 8y ago

This could be a form of discrimination against native born applicants. A person's "mother tongue" is not some trivial matter. Many Indians I've worked with are not as fluent in English as they claim to be. Communication skills matter. Trying to even the playing field so that people who are not native speakers of the local language is ridiculous. I have worked hard to improve my own communication skills and consider it a very valuable skill when searching for employment.

asdff 8y ago
Communication skills are tested in the interview.

umichguy 8y ago

The UK Civil Service already does this. They ask you to remove all PII, school/ university names. That said you can leave your previous employer names in it. They call it "name-blind" recruitment.