[fidla]

I applied to over 70 jobs at Hampshire college, UMass Amherst, Mt Holyoke College and Amherst College. All open positions, not 1 interview. I'm a white man. I finally took my race, and gender off the application and got 3 interviews right away

[hlieberman]

Honest question: why was race and gender even /on/ your application in the first place? Do you mean the EEO questions that they ask -- because those are absolutely not supposed to be part of the application. Or do you mean you have it on your resume? Because... why?

[spuzz]

IDK about this guy, maybe just trolling, but when I was hiring I realized you can really tell from indirect information. Name and college name will give you a real strong guess.

It was weird because I was just trying to avoid h1-b applicants since I was told we weren't doing that, but I quickly realized that I was optimizing against indian people and also that taking bias out of the hiring process is a lie that HR tells itself for legal liability reasons.

[nextos]

AFAIK, he is not trolling. Right now, in Academia, there is a very strong movement towards hiring diversity candidates.

For example, some faculty openings are advertised as women or minorities only.

In EU, some have sued and successfully overturned this kind of bias, as it is in principle not legal to discriminate by sex or race.

[uriah]

Yeah, you can’t really filter based on resume without risking legal liability. There are plenty of people who look like they would need a visa sponsorship but don’t necessarily (e.g. spouses of H1B or green card holders)

[UncleOxidant]

...or children of Indian immigrants.

[busterarm]

For the vast majority of people you can tell by given name and surname.

You get around this by picking a gender-ambiguous nickname and using that as your given name. Ariel, Logan, Dakota, Drew, Jordan, etc.

Surnames are harder, but you're aiming for ambiguity. Williams, Johnson, Smith, Jones and Brown -- e.g., the five most common African American surnames. Other options like Kim and Lee will also get you far here.

[dexwiz]

I could see a different given name, but a different surname? Won't that throw up some red flags once HR starts on boarding you? Or what about referrals, gotta make sure to coordinate with them.

[busterarm]

I said harder. Like change your name hard.

One company I worked for hired a woman once who had a completely fraudulent identity and gave different identification entirely to the person we were interviewing/hired and she justified it to HR saying she was running away from an abusive relationship. Her paychecks were even different than the name in the employee directory!

We only found out long after she'd stopped working with us when she made the news for trying to murder a stranger while high on drugs. She had made the news and was on camera with a completely unfamiliar name to us.

[fidla]

As you can tell these are College jobs and they have a race and gender aspect to every application. You're not required by law to fill it out, but they do use it as part of the screening process

[tomwphillips]

Did you re-apply to the same places with and without those factors? Because if you didn’t, it’s hard to be sure what you’re implying is true.

Alternative explanation: you applied for competitive roles and didn’t hear back because there were better candidates, then you applied for less competitive roles and got interviews.

[fidla]

Oh yes I should have made that clear. I resubmitted my application to all of the original jobs

[r9295]

Why did you include your race and gender in your application?

[pksebben]

This is a fair point. Including them is a little weird in the first place and totally a red flag.

[zero-sharp]

I can find plenty of Indeed postings that won't let you submit the application without specifying ...

[speedgoose]

Could it be a USA thing?

[t-writescode]

I'm not in HR; but I imagine they're very averse to anything that might reflect bias in employment and putting your gender, current ability to get pregnant, religion, etc, on a resume would absolutely count in that way, I imagine.

[hackable_sand]

Definitely not US. We have voluntary self identification.

[zero-sharp]

Yea that's how it's supposed to be, right? However, I am sure that I've seen applications which don't categorize that input as optional.

[ldjkfkdsjnv]

Such is life. Not only do they not want to hire you from a dei perspective, many of the foreign engineers from India/China, also do not want to hire you. They want to hire their overseas brethren.

[UncleOxidant]

You were downvoted, and while I think DEI has some good aspects, your 2nd point is spot on because I've seen it in person at a largish, household name tech company. You see Indian managers who only have Indian engineers working for them and you see Chinese managers who only have Chinese engineers working for them. Go through the cafeteria at lunchtime and you see it pretty much ethnically sorted - the Indians aren't sitting with the Chinese, and vice versa. Now it wasn't 100%, I worked for a guy who was ethnically Chinese from Malaysia and he had Indians and whities like me working for him. But if I saw in internal job listing that looked interesting and the manager was Indian, for example, I'd look at the org chart to see the names of the people working for them to see if it was an all-Indian group. If it was then there wasn't much point in applying.