And that's totally fine. We all have our own heuristics for determining what we like in a candidate, but we need to be very, very critical of those measures and make sure they aren't masking other less justifiable gut instinct decisions. Bias is generally subconscious— If it really was as cut-and-dried as we like to think, then it wouldn't be a gut feeling metric at all— we'd be able to back up our reasoning with hard facts. As rational as they might seem, 'gut feeling' criteria almost universally favor people we're comfortable with rather than the most qualified candidate. That's a real problem for folks who aren't part of the dominant culture of the industry: Millenial to Gen-X straight white and asian guys.
If a qualified candidate only having certificate credentials merely prompts further investigation, then great. However, it's quite often the tipping point between round-filing a good candidate and calling another one in for an interview. While it might seem innocuous on a micro level, on a macro level this affects big swaths of the population.
In the 2005 Study Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal (https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w9873/w9873...), they responded to 1300 job ads with 5000 equally-weighted resumes with randomly assigned names which were either stereotypically white, like Emily Walsh or Greg Baker, or stereotypically black, like Lakisha Washington or Jamal Jones. Resumes with white sounding names were 50% more likely to receive a callback. Fifty percent! The likelihood of 1300 randomly chosen job ads being run by the KKK is pretty low. Most, if not all of them were probably letting "gut instinct" criteria swing their judgement.
If you had a video game where the sole task was getting a job, one race having a built-in buff where the callback was 50% greater without being balanced somewhere else would be insanely unfair. Not only is it not balanced, but we're literally only talking about these folks names— never mind their appearance, manner of speaking, cultural references, etc.
We all like to think of ourselves as good people but that's not enough to stop this. We need to deliberately interrogate our MO, here.
If a qualified candidate only having certificate credentials merely prompts further investigation, then great. However, it's quite often the tipping point between round-filing a good candidate and calling another one in for an interview. While it might seem innocuous on a micro level, on a macro level this affects big swaths of the population.
In the 2005 Study Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal (https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w9873/w9873...), they responded to 1300 job ads with 5000 equally-weighted resumes with randomly assigned names which were either stereotypically white, like Emily Walsh or Greg Baker, or stereotypically black, like Lakisha Washington or Jamal Jones. Resumes with white sounding names were 50% more likely to receive a callback. Fifty percent! The likelihood of 1300 randomly chosen job ads being run by the KKK is pretty low. Most, if not all of them were probably letting "gut instinct" criteria swing their judgement.
If you had a video game where the sole task was getting a job, one race having a built-in buff where the callback was 50% greater without being balanced somewhere else would be insanely unfair. Not only is it not balanced, but we're literally only talking about these folks names— never mind their appearance, manner of speaking, cultural references, etc.
We all like to think of ourselves as good people but that's not enough to stop this. We need to deliberately interrogate our MO, here.