[danudey]

There's often a separation between the people who bring in the candidates and the people who interview/approve the candidates.

If HR passes me a stack of resumes then that's who I interview; if all the people HR passes me are white, then I'm left to either assume that these were all the qualified candidates who applied (or at least, to operate under that assumption).

If the process gets bounced back because the stack that was passed to me was filtered by HR's unconscious (or conscious) biases, that forces them to give me more diverse candidates to choose from; the best candidate may still be the middle class white dude, but ensuring that the hiring manager is presented with a broad range of options and not just Chad, Biff, and Troy helps the whole pipeline.

[com2kid]

Years ago the software engineering field looked at this problem, came up with good solutions, and then promptly proceeded to implement none of them.

Resumes need to be filtered to remove age, race, gender, name, even what school someone went to. Then ideally the first filtering round of an interview is also completely anonymous, a take home test or a video interview with camera off and a voice filter in place. Heck modern AI tools could even be used to remove accents.

HR has biases, those biases need to be removed.

It only takes a few moments of thinking to realize these techniques are a better way to hire all around. Nothing good can come from someone in HR looking at a resume and thinking "oh that isn't a college I recognize, next candidate."

[chrislongss]

Reminds of the infamous attempt to fight discrimination in orchestras by conducting blind auditions. Which ended up reducing diversity even further.

[naijaboiler]

This has been demonstrably proven to make discrimination worse, not better.

Apparently, people like to discriminate. Where there are overt markers, there is still a chance that people fear the legality of their discrimination. And when you remove overt markers of discrimination, people look for subtle markers, and those exist, and then still end up discriminating.

End result, even fewer qualified members of the discriminated class gets hired.

[zo1]

Of course the "answer" is never that people were biased in favor of DEI groups in the first place, and removing said overt markers of their race just removed that bias because individuals could no longer discriminate. No, the answer was obviously then is that people found "secret" and "subtle" markers instead because they just have to discriminate and don't like DEI groups.

Occams razor comes to mind.

[DangitBobby]

Has it been proven that people still manage to tell races of candidates apart after removing markers? Or is this all just conjecture?

[com2kid]

Do you have links to any studies that removing names and other obvious markers from resumes (college name, employment dates, etc) somehow increases discrimination in HR screening?

I honestly fail to how that could happen.

For example, if HR is throwing away all resumes that aren't from an Ivy League, then removing cities and schools from the resume can only help.

[Manuel_D]

If "subtle markers" can still identify someone's race or gender, then remove those markers too. You can test of this works by giving employees bonuses to correctly guess the candidates' demographics and see if they can predict reliably.

If anonymization reduced the representation of certain demographics maybe it doesn't make discrimination worse, but rather you were wrong about which groups are discriminated against?