Résumé Review is Awful, But We’d Better Get Good At It

An unfortunate truth of hiring is that reviewing a résumé is a process riddled with bias. It’s ruled by opinion and lacks oversight: there are few consequences to making a gut call and marking “Not Right Fit”. Techniques like résumé blinding exist to try to reduce our bias at review time, but are mostly still experimental.

Many of us are still going to be reviewing résumés for a long time. We owe it to our teams and candidates to be as fair about it as we can.

(Full disclosure: I’ve built an anonymous hiring platform called Limbo attempting to address this problem. I’m writing this partially so you’ll go hire someone great from Limbo, but also in the hopes it’s useful in your other, more traditional hiring practices.)

Maybe you’ve already accepted that bias exists in résumé review. You’ve committed to yourself that you intend to be more aware. If so, this post is for you.

What You May Already Know

You may already know of the discrimination studies that show that all things being equal, white sounding names get 50% more call backs than black sounding names, and that male names are often deemed more “competent” than female names in STEM.

It’s crucial to be aware of these, and if you aren’t I implore you to go read those linked studies. There are a host of other ways, though, that you might also be discriminating that you may not realize or have confronted.

A Few Caveats

• What is “bias”? In this post, I’m mostly speaking about unconscious bias — bias against a group we don’t intend but do anyway — driven by specific cognitive biases. Cognitive biases have been well studied and allow us to be more tactical in understanding our failings during résumé review.
• If you’re hoping to hire a more diverse group, you should also be doing the work to ensure your environment is inclusive and welcoming to a broad range of folks. Jason Wong’s Bootstrapping Inclusion is an accessible primer.
• I should say that I am no expert here. I have hired a fair amount as an engineering manager, but my experience in bias is largely found in the guidance and writing of others and — as a white male in tech leadership — some painful self reflection. If you’re interested, Project Include’s Hiring Recommendations are great, as well as Lara Hogan’s Resources on Allyship.

1. You Can’t Hire People Who Don’t Apply

Bias can occur before you even look at a single résumé. Where are you gathering your leads? A healthy mix of sources will lead you to folks who might not apply via traditional means or have access to your peer network. This is hard work, but critical for increasing the diversity of your candidates.

Alternative sources (some of them tech-industry specific) can include:

• Coding Bootcamps
• Blind processes like Triplebyte or, dare I suggest, Limbo
• Tapping into networks of folks with diverse backgrounds — organizations like /dev/color or Code2040
• For university recruiting, sourcing from hispanic serving institutions or historically black colleges
• Speaking or writing about your company and its approach to D&I

Focusing on inclusion internally can also provide a halo effect of great leads: as your company becomes known as a great place for folks to work, people will talk.

One of my favorite examples of nontraditional sourcing comes from Etsy in 2012: Hacker Grants for Women. Etsy spent $50,000 to sponsor 10 women to attend Recurse Center (then known as Hacker School), a coding boot camp in New York, and also hosted the session in their HQ.

This had the tremendous trait of being both an effective marketing tactic for Etsy and an industry-positive effort. They successfully hired five women from the first two batches as well as five men. (As it happens, this effort inspired me join Etsy later in 2012.)

Job Descriptions Can Turn Folks Away

The content and tone of your job description can also have a large impact on the candidates who choose to apply. Services like Textio are useful approaches to writing more inclusive job descriptions. Feedback from folks with varying backgrounds can also be very helpful — either people you know and trust or professional consultants. Either way, ensure they are paid for their time: improving the diversity of your recruitment pipeline is an investment in your company’s future and should be treated as such.

2. Take Care With Visas

Many companies simply can’t sponsor visas. Visas can be very painful to obtain, and many companies can’t bear the expense.

Where this becomes problematic is when you expect that a candidate will “probably” need a visa based on their name or background. This unfairly affects folks with “foreign-sounding” names who may very much be citizens or otherwise authorized. This is discrimination.

It is much more efficient and honest to do two things:

1. Express your sponsorship position in your job descriptions, so applicants can avoid wasting their time.
2. Ask candidates up front during application submission if they are authorized to work in the United States without sponsorship to filter out candidates who might have missed that part of the job description.

Filtering candidates due to visa expectations during résumé review is both inefficient and a source of bias. On the flip side, if you have the resources, a great way to increase racial and cultural diversity in your pipeline is to sponsor visas!

3. Don’t Confuse Age and Experience

It’s easy to make flawed assumptions around experience and age. If you see someone has a degree from the early 90’s, you might expect a certain path their career has taken, or opinions they have formed.

But experience and age are different things. Someone could have come into their industry at a later date, pivoted their career intentionally, or had gaps due to life circumstances.

Instead, focus on their experience as written and how it relates to your role.

4. “Culture Fit”

“Culture Fit” is often an unexamined term that leads to opinion driving a hire decision. In résumé review, this usually looks like favoring someone sharing your background, school, or hobby.

This is known as in-group favoritism, where while we may not necessarily have negative feelings towards one group (although this does of course happen), we will tend to favor people we identify as members of our in-group.

This is often discriminatory and can lead to a homogeneous and inflexible culture. To combat this, some folks have started using concepts like “Culture Add” or “Cultural Contribution”.

…hiring for cultural contribution forces managers to think critically about their existing culture: What’s lacking? Where do we want to go? Acknowledging that our culture needn’t be static helps us have serious conversations about what we want and how the world works.

— Diego Rodriguez, “Hiring: It’s About Cultural Contribution, Not Cultural Fit”

Adding perspectives can increase your company’s overall health and ability to change. Considering a cultural contribution is an important shift not only at résumé review time but for creating an overall more inclusive environment.

5. Class Discrimination

In trying to get a sense of “who someone is”, you might be tempted to build your own narrative based on where or how they grew up (say, high school or college diplomas). This can often be a pitfall in terms of class discrimination. You might have a preconceived notion of someone if they grew up in Manhattan, say, or Dallas. Unlike in-group favoritism, this is typically a negative correlation and may be Confirmation Bias.

Their story may be a foundational part of their experience! But let them tell their own story, and only if they choose — don’t prescribe a narrative to them based on your notions of their background.

6. Top School Syndrome

Graduating from a top university can be a signal of hard work and achievement, but top schools are also heavily weighted toward socioeconomic privilege. You are more likely to speak to someone coming from the top 1% of income than from the bottom 60%.

At 38 colleges in America, including five in the Ivy League — Dartmouth, Princeton, Yale, Penn and Brown — more students came from the top 1 percent of the income scale than from the entire bottom 60 percent.

— NYTimes, “America’s Great Working-Class Colleges”

Many startups push hard to recruit direct from elite universities for “top talent”. This certainly doesn’t mean you should avoid top schools entirely, but given the imbalance of socioeconomic status, an overfocus on top schools can lead to a homogeneous culture. There’s also evidence — but nothing definitive that I’ve found — that university doesn’t play much of a role in on-the-job performance.

Focusing on skills based evaluation, and qualification rather than institution, can help avoid this.

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Thanks for reading. If you work in tech and you’re interested in hiring fairly, I’d encourage you to hire a great engineer, designer, PM or manager on Limbo (or if you’re quietly thinking about something new, post a profile). We’ve built a blind and anonymous hiring platform, focusing on a candidate’s skills and experience.

Thanks to Tiffany Dohzen and Ian Malpass for their review of this post. Any errors are entirely my own.

Résumé Review is Awful, But We’d Better Get Good At It was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.