17 ms·

Can fake names create bias in interviewing?

84 points by derwiki 8y ago

mattigames 8y ago
The obsession with biases is a form of bias, you not only have to check what fake name you are submitting, you must make sure the people reading it are the same, that the mood of the people reading its the same and that their way of thinking hasn't changed much; such psychological uncertainties are the same reason psychology experiments are hard to replicate. Not to mention the randomness of things like if your resume was the first one thew saw or the last one, and many other things you have no knowledge or control over.
- rootusrootus 8y ago
  Alternatively, if you are non-white and you have a name like Jamal, don't overthink it, call yourself Michael instead.
  - groby_b 8y ago
    Or, if you're white and think everybody is overthinking this, just call yourself Jamal.
- ASpring 8y ago
  I completely agree that the questions that we choose to ask determine the knowledge that we get. This experiment is clearly situated within the positivist view of research. However I don't think that invalidates the result, the whole point of randomization of people into the conditions (here the names) is to control for these latent variables like you've talked about (way of reading, mood, etc). Are you critiquing randomization in general or this specific experiment?
  - camelNotation 8y ago
    Randomization solves for the problem, that's true, but that isn't what people are arguing when they criticize social science research like this. Theoretically, if you have X number of factors you can't control for, then there should be some threshold Y where the sample size benefits from random selection and accounts for those factors. Right now, social scientists have formulas they use to establish what is and is not an acceptable population when doing experiments like this. The problem that is being identified (and can't be stated often enough, honestly) is that human emotional preferences and variability of experience means that X is far more variable than anyone can conceive. A human being is an extremely complex biological system and that complexity compounds when you begin comparing people to one another and in groups. So unless you are actively controlling for every possible factor in that system, the assumption that you can use any formula to establish a reasonable population size Y is absurd. Anyone with half a brain can see this, but social science has to deliver on a product and justify its existence with research funding, so it developed standards - like the aforementioned formulas - that allow it to ignore the problem of identifying X and instead just assuming their synthetic Y will do. This is the real reason why psychologists have a replication crisis and why they always will. Many of them don't even use the standards they have because honestly, they all realize it's nonsense to begin with.
    - ASpring 8y ago
      Thanks for this comment, it's well thought out and elucidates what the original poster is probably critiquing. I want to make sure I'm understanding, are you saying that there is no sample size with which you would be comfortable making a conclusion about this? That's what I'm taking away from this comment "the assumption that you can use any formula to establish a reasonable population size Y is absurd."
      - camelNotation 8y ago
        What I mean is that social science research will only ever be able to speak to the samples they are studying. That's usually okay, though, because typically in an experiment with difficult variability, you can gain certainty through replication. With social science, the variability in human beings is so significant that I don't think replication works the same way. I think you would need to replicate studies about a dozen times across different cultures, timeframes, languages, regions, religions, etc just to even begin approaching something like reliable results. And given the fact that social science has a replication problem (an understatement if I'm right), the entire area of study is suspect.
- oarabbus_ 8y ago
  I'm certainly stereotyping and assuming (and we know what they say about assuming) But I'd be willing to put money down you're in the demographic who tends not to fall victim to negative biases. I'll put $50 on that.
  - mattigames 8y ago
    Unfortunately there is no clear answer to that, I'm latino but living and working in a south american country so its irrelevant; but I have searched for jobs overseas (remote) and a few times I have landed the job.
Causality1 8y ago
Of course they do, because we judge people based on what their names tell us about the environment they probably came from. If you have room in your schedule for one interview and you have to choose between "Mary Smith", "Sha'Quonda Jones", and "Bubba-Joe Hartford", you know damn well which one of them is getting your time.
- c22 8y ago
  The one with the most relevant experience on their resume?
- JustSomeNobody 8y ago
  You're getting down voted (at the time of my comment), but industry hiring practices tend to agree with you.
  - adjkant 8y ago
    Why shouldn't the practices be changed when you have control though? If the comment said "today's practices" then I wouldn't have downvoted, it's accurate. I downvoted this because of the use of the word "you", which implies the poster would choose it themselves.
  - krapp 8y ago
    >but industry hiring practices tend to agree with you. Yes. Industry hiring practices enforce systemic racial and class prejudice, as illustrated and defended by the GP. "But one name looks like a hillbilly and one is really black." That's the problem.
- abledon 8y ago
  There are 9 people in the world called 'han solo'. https://ew.com/article/2015/12/17/star-wars-names/ https://ew.com/article/2015/12/17/star-wars-names/
- dopamean 8y ago
  If you really only have time for one interview wouldn't you want to pick the candidate you're most likely to hire? So wouldn't you take a closer look at the resumes and not the names?
hiei 8y ago
I always considered something similar with my name. For example if my legal name is Ronnie should I put Ron/Ronald on professional resumes/LinkedIn? Even though that's not my real name. Or Donnie vs. Don/Donald. Tommy vs. Tom/Thomas. It just seems anything ending in "ie,y" appears less professional.
- blihp 8y ago
  I probably would. I think the problem is that so many people associate ie/y with nicknames for kids that it biases them. I'd probably use Ron initially and then when you get to the face-to-face interview stage you can let people know that you generally go by Ronnie if they ask. HR isn't going to care what you go by online or your resume as long as the 'official' paperwork you submit is correct.
40acres 8y ago
Given names is one of the most effective way to encode culture. We already know that individuals harbor some biases based on culture, so it's no surprise that there is some bias when people exchange names. My mother explicitly gave me a "white sounding" name when I was born and in my experience changing your name is one of the most common ways that those from other cultures try to integrate in America and minimize bias. There are many people in my corporation that are South East Asian but go anglicized names like: John, Kevin and Mary. They usually keep the family name though.
- acomjean 8y ago
  > in my experience changing your name is one of the most common ways that those from other cultures try to integrate in America and minimize bias. My grandfather changed our family name (which to be fair was spelled very badly when character sets were converted). It’s funny because nobody knows what ethnicity “Comjean” is. People get confused and they are thinking about it. Adding to the confusion my parents gave me a first name from the old country. People in moments of candor ( or from New York) have told me 1. I don’t look like my name . And 2 misguessed my country of origin often putting me into their own.
stcredzero 8y ago
I think I've seen many people on reddit assume I'm an urban high school kid because of my username.
- throwawaymath 8y ago
  stcredzero? "Urban high school kid" isn't jumping out at me. ...Actually, nothing jumps out at me at all. I'm not sure what to make of it. Why do they read high school kid out of that?
  - chrinic83 8y ago
    "Millennial" here. stcredzero. Street credit. Usually referred to as social status in the neighborhood and local friend groups. Usually used by rappers and African American neighborhoods. However, people living in these neighborhoods don't actually say this today. Typically middle and high school students hear this on TV/radio and use it in their own (usually upper/middle class) circles to increase their social status. Zero refers to zero street cred. Username plays a pun, the the user actually has zero cred. Again, only used by people outside the "street" aka in middle and high school. Also 98% chance OP is male. I'd say 50-60% white, sice we're on HN. With the other 40-50% being Asian or Indian. In summary, yes, usernames tell you a lot.
    - stcredzero 8y ago
      Also 98% chance OP is male. I'd say 50-60% white, since we're on HN. With the other 40-50% being Asian or Indian. In summary, yes, usernames tell you a lot. But site demographics tell you a lot more!
    - quickthrower2 8y ago
      Are you an over the top 35/36 year old?
    - mont 8y ago
      I'd guess that the race/gender percentages you have or more so from where you're interacting with stcredzero than there name.
manfredo 8y ago
I suspect many companies wouldn't use this as it would make affirmative hiring policies more difficult. For example, recruiters at my company curate lists of names that are majority female, black, or Hispanic (pulled from the census bureau) in order to try and determine which candidates are diverse. Recruiters at my company aren't explicitly told to hit certain quotas, but they are given larger bonuses for diverse hires and they do have targets for certain percentages of diverse candidate. Maybe I'm assuming that Bay Area hiring practices are more universal than they really are. Perhaps Bay Area tech companies are under particular pressure to increase the percentage of diverse employees. For instance my company is targeting 33% female tech employees, but most data says women comprise ~20-25% of the tech workforce. Tough to reach those targets without some sort of bias. For what it's worth I don't think our diversity hiring practices result in any lowered caliber of hires. Most of the affirmative hiring policies only affect resume review and technical phone interviews.
- kristianc 8y ago
  This comment reminds me somewhat of the Oxford and Cambridge interviewing processes. They have names and educational backgrounds to hand, and it's well known that all things being equal, tutors would always rather go for a kid from a state echool / underprivileged / non traditional background over one that went to a top public school. It's not just a matter of hitting targets - the alternative is that everyone who gets in is from a wealthy family or went to a top fee paying school. If everything is blind, you get less of an opportunity to engage in this kind of affirmative action.
  - manfredo 8y ago
    It's a double edged sword. In tech, it's been found that blind hiring processes where candidates' name, education, and past employers are obscured (a third party broadly describes the education and work experience but doesn't give any explicit names) does result in more hires from less prestigious universities and companies. But it does make the hired population more male and more white & Asian. I think triplebyte did a study.
    - 8y ago
kristianc 8y ago
Some words are prettier than others. All of the words in the first list are quite long and fantastical, whereas the latter are fairly common assonant word pairs. It's natural that the first then are more evocative and have nicer associations.
onewhonknocks 8y ago
This reminds me of an interesting Harvard study I read a few years ago titled 'Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal'. It can be found here: https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/sendhil/files/are_emily_and_greg_more_employable_than_lakisha_and_jamal.pdf https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/sendhil/files/are_emily_an...
- eli 8y ago
  There's another famous study where tenure committees members ranked CVs with traditionally male names on them better than ones with traditionally female names. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023%2FA%3A1018839203698 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023%2FA%3A101883920369...
- iguy 8y ago
  IIRC this was one of the studies whose name list was criticised for having a lot of class differences as well as claimed race differences: when the authors sat down to invent white- and black-sounding names, they picked high-class and low-class names, thus injecting their own stereotypes into their data.
  - VikingCoder 8y ago
    I saw another study where they found phone numbers for mental health professionals, and they called and left a message, asking someone to call them back to set up a first appointment. The had other people rate the voices as "sounds black" / "sounds white," and "sounds white-collar" / "sounds blue-collar." That way, they measured the correlation between "sounds black" and "doesn't get call backs." As you can imagine, "white" sounding people got more call backs. And "white-collar" sounding people got more call backs. I don't know if they reported which was more beneficial, sounding white, or white-collar. My point being, if you have a large enough collection of names, and you measure how the candidate appears to them, you can then correlate the appearance with the outcome, showing the bias against that appearance. You don't need to have the researchers generate their own candidates.
smelendez 8y ago
I guess I don't see the point of these names? Why not just Candidate A,B,C or 1,2,3, etc.
- eli 8y ago
  Yup, this is called "blind hiring" and it's a thing. https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/news/hr-magazine/0418/pages/can-blind-hiring-improve-workplace-diversity.aspx https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/news/hr-magazine/0418/pages/ca...
peruvian 8y ago
Heh. I have a very Hispanic name but I am white/European. This is fairly common where I am originally from and even more in other places. I've definitely gotten weird looks when I go from phone screen -> in person interview. Unfortunately Americans, even progressive ones, have a very narrow view of what "Hispanic" means.
- manfredo 8y ago
  Same boat here. I am Cuban, but basically completely white. A lot of people don't realize that Hispanic is a cultural designation that encompasses multiple races. Many are of native or mixed Central and South American descent. Many are black, descendants of Africans. Many are white. Peru has a large Japanese diaspora, so I guess it's possible to have Asian Hispanics as well (though I've never met anyone that identifies as such).
  - peruvian 8y ago
    Yep. One of our presidents was Japanese-Peruvian, and I went to school in Peru with a few people with Japanese first and last names.
    - manfredo 8y ago
      Interesting! Out of curiosity, how integrated were the Japanese students into Peruvian society? Did they fluently speak Spanish? Did they consider themselves Hispanic (though I think "Hispanic" is more of a term North Americans apply to South and Central Americas, so apologies if this last question is hard to answer)?
      - peruvian 8y ago
        > Interesting! Out of curiosity, how integrated were the Japanese students into Peruvian society? 100% integrated, considered themselves Peruvian, couldn't tell the difference without looking at them. The immigration was decades if not a century before I grew up.
- 8y ago
sokoloff 8y ago
As a hiring manager, if you give me a fake name, it is to your advantage if it's the same fake name you use on LinkedIn, github, stackoverflow, and other sites that are going to come up when I google you... I don't care about your social media accounts, your country of origin, your gender, or anything else that's irrelevant to your performance, but I do care about your technical history and abilities (and of course, your eligibility to work).
- quickthrower2 8y ago
  Most names (first name plus surname) are not unique.
  - sokoloff 8y ago
    Yes, but name and resume work history generally is unique enough, especially at the senior levels. There are five pages of results on LinkedIn for John Carmack. I suspect that you and I have the exact same John Carmack in mind, though.
- cimmanom 8y ago
  TFA is about the company assigning randomized pseudonyms to candidates.
  - sokoloff 8y ago
    I understand. Whether the candidate, a researcher, or my in-house recruiter mangles the name, the end effect is the same.
    - cimmanom 8y ago
      Why? I can get being pissed if someone's misrepresenting their identity (or annoyed if they're representing it inconsistently) as a job seeker. But AFAICT this is about letting the candidate's performance be mentally/emotionally isolated from all the baggage that comes along with their history. It doesn't even preclude screening people out based on history before this anonymized interview. You can then put it back together with the other information you have about them once you've formed an opinion of their technical abilities without preconceptions about them.
hhs 8y ago
I think there are lots of factors involved with names, but yeah. Even the spelling of names makes a difference. Interesting example: Dale Carnegie deliberately changed his last name from "Carnagey" to "Carnegie" so people, on some subliminal way, may associate him with the classy steel-building Andrew Carnegie family.
- rchaud 8y ago
  Charlie Sheen's birth name is Ramon Estevez. Despite it's "liberal bias", Hollywood is notorious for its preference for "Real American (TM)" names.
  - rdc12 8y ago
    And his dad, Martin Sheen's birth name was Ramón Gerard Antonio Estévez
  - CyberDildonics 8y ago
    That's probably why his brother, Emilio Estevez was never able to make it as an actor, having a meager 47 acting credits over the course of 45 years https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000389/?ref_=nv_sr_1 https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000389/?ref_=nv_sr_1
aerovistae 8y ago
"infinite avalanche" is a commonplace, boring phrase? Wonder where he's from.
- haditab 8y ago
  Sounds like he's super white.

84 points by derwiki 8y ago

The obsession with biases is a form of bias, you not only have to check what fake name you are submitting, you must make sure the people reading it are the same, that the mood of the people reading its the same and that their way of thinking hasn't changed much; such psychological uncertainties are the same reason psychology experiments are hard to replicate. Not to mention the randomness of things like if your resume was the first one thew saw or the last one, and many other things you have no knowledge or control over.

rootusrootus 8y ago
Alternatively, if you are non-white and you have a name like Jamal, don't overthink it, call yourself Michael instead.
- groby_b 8y ago
  Or, if you're white and think everybody is overthinking this, just call yourself Jamal.
ASpring 8y ago
I completely agree that the questions that we choose to ask determine the knowledge that we get. This experiment is clearly situated within the positivist view of research. However I don't think that invalidates the result, the whole point of randomization of people into the conditions (here the names) is to control for these latent variables like you've talked about (way of reading, mood, etc). Are you critiquing randomization in general or this specific experiment?
- camelNotation 8y ago
  Randomization solves for the problem, that's true, but that isn't what people are arguing when they criticize social science research like this. Theoretically, if you have X number of factors you can't control for, then there should be some threshold Y where the sample size benefits from random selection and accounts for those factors. Right now, social scientists have formulas they use to establish what is and is not an acceptable population when doing experiments like this. The problem that is being identified (and can't be stated often enough, honestly) is that human emotional preferences and variability of experience means that X is far more variable than anyone can conceive. A human being is an extremely complex biological system and that complexity compounds when you begin comparing people to one another and in groups. So unless you are actively controlling for every possible factor in that system, the assumption that you can use any formula to establish a reasonable population size Y is absurd. Anyone with half a brain can see this, but social science has to deliver on a product and justify its existence with research funding, so it developed standards - like the aforementioned formulas - that allow it to ignore the problem of identifying X and instead just assuming their synthetic Y will do. This is the real reason why psychologists have a replication crisis and why they always will. Many of them don't even use the standards they have because honestly, they all realize it's nonsense to begin with.
  - ASpring 8y ago
    Thanks for this comment, it's well thought out and elucidates what the original poster is probably critiquing. I want to make sure I'm understanding, are you saying that there is no sample size with which you would be comfortable making a conclusion about this? That's what I'm taking away from this comment "the assumption that you can use any formula to establish a reasonable population size Y is absurd."
    - camelNotation 8y ago
      What I mean is that social science research will only ever be able to speak to the samples they are studying. That's usually okay, though, because typically in an experiment with difficult variability, you can gain certainty through replication. With social science, the variability in human beings is so significant that I don't think replication works the same way. I think you would need to replicate studies about a dozen times across different cultures, timeframes, languages, regions, religions, etc just to even begin approaching something like reliable results. And given the fact that social science has a replication problem (an understatement if I'm right), the entire area of study is suspect.
oarabbus_ 8y ago
I'm certainly stereotyping and assuming (and we know what they say about assuming) But I'd be willing to put money down you're in the demographic who tends not to fall victim to negative biases. I'll put $50 on that.
- mattigames 8y ago
  Unfortunately there is no clear answer to that, I'm latino but living and working in a south american country so its irrelevant; but I have searched for jobs overseas (remote) and a few times I have landed the job.

Causality1 8y ago

Of course they do, because we judge people based on what their names tell us about the environment they probably came from. If you have room in your schedule for one interview and you have to choose between "Mary Smith", "Sha'Quonda Jones", and "Bubba-Joe Hartford", you know damn well which one of them is getting your time.

c22 8y ago
The one with the most relevant experience on their resume?
JustSomeNobody 8y ago
You're getting down voted (at the time of my comment), but industry hiring practices tend to agree with you.
- adjkant 8y ago
  Why shouldn't the practices be changed when you have control though? If the comment said "today's practices" then I wouldn't have downvoted, it's accurate. I downvoted this because of the use of the word "you", which implies the poster would choose it themselves.
- krapp 8y ago
  >but industry hiring practices tend to agree with you. Yes. Industry hiring practices enforce systemic racial and class prejudice, as illustrated and defended by the GP. "But one name looks like a hillbilly and one is really black." That's the problem.
abledon 8y ago
There are 9 people in the world called 'han solo'. https://ew.com/article/2015/12/17/star-wars-names/ https://ew.com/article/2015/12/17/star-wars-names/
dopamean 8y ago
If you really only have time for one interview wouldn't you want to pick the candidate you're most likely to hire? So wouldn't you take a closer look at the resumes and not the names?

hiei 8y ago

I always considered something similar with my name. For example if my legal name is Ronnie should I put Ron/Ronald on professional resumes/LinkedIn? Even though that's not my real name. Or Donnie vs. Don/Donald. Tommy vs. Tom/Thomas. It just seems anything ending in "ie,y" appears less professional.

blihp 8y ago
I probably would. I think the problem is that so many people associate ie/y with nicknames for kids that it biases them. I'd probably use Ron initially and then when you get to the face-to-face interview stage you can let people know that you generally go by Ronnie if they ask. HR isn't going to care what you go by online or your resume as long as the 'official' paperwork you submit is correct.

40acres 8y ago

Given names is one of the most effective way to encode culture. We already know that individuals harbor some biases based on culture, so it's no surprise that there is some bias when people exchange names. My mother explicitly gave me a "white sounding" name when I was born and in my experience changing your name is one of the most common ways that those from other cultures try to integrate in America and minimize bias. There are many people in my corporation that are South East Asian but go anglicized names like: John, Kevin and Mary. They usually keep the family name though.

acomjean 8y ago
> in my experience changing your name is one of the most common ways that those from other cultures try to integrate in America and minimize bias. My grandfather changed our family name (which to be fair was spelled very badly when character sets were converted). It’s funny because nobody knows what ethnicity “Comjean” is. People get confused and they are thinking about it. Adding to the confusion my parents gave me a first name from the old country. People in moments of candor ( or from New York) have told me 1. I don’t look like my name . And 2 misguessed my country of origin often putting me into their own.

stcredzero 8y ago

I think I've seen many people on reddit assume I'm an urban high school kid because of my username.

throwawaymath 8y ago
stcredzero? "Urban high school kid" isn't jumping out at me. ...Actually, nothing jumps out at me at all. I'm not sure what to make of it. Why do they read high school kid out of that?
- chrinic83 8y ago
  "Millennial" here. stcredzero. Street credit. Usually referred to as social status in the neighborhood and local friend groups. Usually used by rappers and African American neighborhoods. However, people living in these neighborhoods don't actually say this today. Typically middle and high school students hear this on TV/radio and use it in their own (usually upper/middle class) circles to increase their social status. Zero refers to zero street cred. Username plays a pun, the the user actually has zero cred. Again, only used by people outside the "street" aka in middle and high school. Also 98% chance OP is male. I'd say 50-60% white, sice we're on HN. With the other 40-50% being Asian or Indian. In summary, yes, usernames tell you a lot.
  - stcredzero 8y ago
    Also 98% chance OP is male. I'd say 50-60% white, since we're on HN. With the other 40-50% being Asian or Indian. In summary, yes, usernames tell you a lot. But site demographics tell you a lot more!
  - quickthrower2 8y ago
    Are you an over the top 35/36 year old?
  - mont 8y ago
    I'd guess that the race/gender percentages you have or more so from where you're interacting with stcredzero than there name.

manfredo 8y ago

I suspect many companies wouldn't use this as it would make affirmative hiring policies more difficult. For example, recruiters at my company curate lists of names that are majority female, black, or Hispanic (pulled from the census bureau) in order to try and determine which candidates are diverse. Recruiters at my company aren't explicitly told to hit certain quotas, but they are given larger bonuses for diverse hires and they do have targets for certain percentages of diverse candidate. Maybe I'm assuming that Bay Area hiring practices are more universal than they really are. Perhaps Bay Area tech companies are under particular pressure to increase the percentage of diverse employees. For instance my company is targeting 33% female tech employees, but most data says women comprise ~20-25% of the tech workforce. Tough to reach those targets without some sort of bias. For what it's worth I don't think our diversity hiring practices result in any lowered caliber of hires. Most of the affirmative hiring policies only affect resume review and technical phone interviews.

kristianc 8y ago
This comment reminds me somewhat of the Oxford and Cambridge interviewing processes. They have names and educational backgrounds to hand, and it's well known that all things being equal, tutors would always rather go for a kid from a state echool / underprivileged / non traditional background over one that went to a top public school. It's not just a matter of hitting targets - the alternative is that everyone who gets in is from a wealthy family or went to a top fee paying school. If everything is blind, you get less of an opportunity to engage in this kind of affirmative action.
- manfredo 8y ago
  It's a double edged sword. In tech, it's been found that blind hiring processes where candidates' name, education, and past employers are obscured (a third party broadly describes the education and work experience but doesn't give any explicit names) does result in more hires from less prestigious universities and companies. But it does make the hired population more male and more white & Asian. I think triplebyte did a study.
  - 8y ago

kristianc 8y ago

Some words are prettier than others. All of the words in the first list are quite long and fantastical, whereas the latter are fairly common assonant word pairs. It's natural that the first then are more evocative and have nicer associations.

onewhonknocks 8y ago

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

eli 8y ago
There's another famous study where tenure committees members ranked CVs with traditionally male names on them better than ones with traditionally female names. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023%2FA%3A1018839203698 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023%2FA%3A101883920369...
iguy 8y ago
IIRC this was one of the studies whose name list was criticised for having a lot of class differences as well as claimed race differences: when the authors sat down to invent white- and black-sounding names, they picked high-class and low-class names, thus injecting their own stereotypes into their data.
- VikingCoder 8y ago
  I saw another study where they found phone numbers for mental health professionals, and they called and left a message, asking someone to call them back to set up a first appointment. The had other people rate the voices as "sounds black" / "sounds white," and "sounds white-collar" / "sounds blue-collar." That way, they measured the correlation between "sounds black" and "doesn't get call backs." As you can imagine, "white" sounding people got more call backs. And "white-collar" sounding people got more call backs. I don't know if they reported which was more beneficial, sounding white, or white-collar. My point being, if you have a large enough collection of names, and you measure how the candidate appears to them, you can then correlate the appearance with the outcome, showing the bias against that appearance. You don't need to have the researchers generate their own candidates.

smelendez 8y ago

I guess I don't see the point of these names? Why not just Candidate A,B,C or 1,2,3, etc.

eli 8y ago
Yup, this is called "blind hiring" and it's a thing. https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/news/hr-magazine/0418/pages/can-blind-hiring-improve-workplace-diversity.aspx https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/news/hr-magazine/0418/pages/ca...

peruvian 8y ago

Heh. I have a very Hispanic name but I am white/European. This is fairly common where I am originally from and even more in other places. I've definitely gotten weird looks when I go from phone screen -> in person interview. Unfortunately Americans, even progressive ones, have a very narrow view of what "Hispanic" means.

manfredo 8y ago
Same boat here. I am Cuban, but basically completely white. A lot of people don't realize that Hispanic is a cultural designation that encompasses multiple races. Many are of native or mixed Central and South American descent. Many are black, descendants of Africans. Many are white. Peru has a large Japanese diaspora, so I guess it's possible to have Asian Hispanics as well (though I've never met anyone that identifies as such).
- peruvian 8y ago
  Yep. One of our presidents was Japanese-Peruvian, and I went to school in Peru with a few people with Japanese first and last names.
  - manfredo 8y ago
    Interesting! Out of curiosity, how integrated were the Japanese students into Peruvian society? Did they fluently speak Spanish? Did they consider themselves Hispanic (though I think "Hispanic" is more of a term North Americans apply to South and Central Americas, so apologies if this last question is hard to answer)?
    - peruvian 8y ago
      > Interesting! Out of curiosity, how integrated were the Japanese students into Peruvian society? 100% integrated, considered themselves Peruvian, couldn't tell the difference without looking at them. The immigration was decades if not a century before I grew up.
8y ago

sokoloff 8y ago

As a hiring manager, if you give me a fake name, it is to your advantage if it's the same fake name you use on LinkedIn, github, stackoverflow, and other sites that are going to come up when I google you... I don't care about your social media accounts, your country of origin, your gender, or anything else that's irrelevant to your performance, but I do care about your technical history and abilities (and of course, your eligibility to work).

quickthrower2 8y ago
Most names (first name plus surname) are not unique.
- sokoloff 8y ago
  Yes, but name and resume work history generally is unique enough, especially at the senior levels. There are five pages of results on LinkedIn for John Carmack. I suspect that you and I have the exact same John Carmack in mind, though.
cimmanom 8y ago
TFA is about the company assigning randomized pseudonyms to candidates.
- sokoloff 8y ago
  I understand. Whether the candidate, a researcher, or my in-house recruiter mangles the name, the end effect is the same.
  - cimmanom 8y ago
    Why? I can get being pissed if someone's misrepresenting their identity (or annoyed if they're representing it inconsistently) as a job seeker. But AFAICT this is about letting the candidate's performance be mentally/emotionally isolated from all the baggage that comes along with their history. It doesn't even preclude screening people out based on history before this anonymized interview. You can then put it back together with the other information you have about them once you've formed an opinion of their technical abilities without preconceptions about them.

hhs 8y ago

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

rchaud 8y ago
Charlie Sheen's birth name is Ramon Estevez. Despite it's "liberal bias", Hollywood is notorious for its preference for "Real American (TM)" names.
- rdc12 8y ago
  And his dad, Martin Sheen's birth name was Ramón Gerard Antonio Estévez
- CyberDildonics 8y ago
  That's probably why his brother, Emilio Estevez was never able to make it as an actor, having a meager 47 acting credits over the course of 45 years https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000389/?ref_=nv_sr_1 https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000389/?ref_=nv_sr_1

aerovistae 8y ago

"infinite avalanche" is a commonplace, boring phrase? Wonder where he's from.

haditab 8y ago
Sounds like he's super white.