Q TIPS:
Quick and Quintessential Career & Job Tips
Job-hunting tips from the April 14, 2003 issue of
QuintZine.
To test whether employers discriminate against black job applicants, Marianne Bertrand of the University of Chicago and
Sendhil Mullainathan of M.I.T. conducted an unusual experiment. They selected 1,300 help-wanted ads from newspapers in Boston
and Chicago and submitted multiple resumes from phantom job seekers. The researchers randomly assigned the first names
on the resumes, choosing from one set that is particularly common among blacks and from another that is common among
whites. So Kristen and Tamika, and Brad and Tyrone, applied for jobs from
the same pool of want ads and had equivalent resumes. Nine names were selected to represent each category: black women,
white women, black men, and white men. Last names common to the racial group were also assigned. Four resumes were
typically submitted for each job opening, drawn from a reservoir of 160. Nearly 5,000 applications were submitted from mid-2001 to
mid-2002. Professors Bertrand and Mullainathan kept track of which candidates were invited for job interviews. The results
are disturbing. Applicants with white-sounding names were 50 percent more likely to be called for interviews than were
those with black-sounding names. Interviews were requested for 10.1 percent of applicants with white-sounding names and only 6.7
percent of those with black-sounding names.
Within racial groups, applications with men's or women's names were equally likely to result in calls for interviews, providing little
evidence of discrimination based on sex in these entry-level jobs. Their most alarming finding is that the likelihood of being called for
an interview rises sharply with an applicant's credentials -- such as experience and honors -- for those with white-sounding names, but
much less for those with black-sounding names. A grave concern is that this phenomenon may be damping the incentives for blacks
to acquire job skills, producing a self-fulfilling prophecy that perpetuates prejudice and misallocates resources.
Created by psychologists at Yale University and the University of Washington, "Dig Deeper: Test Yourself For
Hidden Bias" is a collection of Implicit Association Tests (IAT) that measures unconscious bias. From the site: "We
invite you to test yourself and reveal what may be lingering in your psyche. Each test takes about five minutes, and your
privacy is protected -- no identifying information is collected or distributed. Your test results may disturb you -- more than
1 million tests have been taken, and the majority reveal unconscious bias."
Find the tests here. (Suggested by this issue's Q&A subject, Ellen Mulqueen.)
An aging workforce means that critical shortages of workers will emerge as baby boomers retire en masse, especially in such
fields as government, energy, manufacturing, and health care, reports The Five O'Clock Club. Knowledge transfer is just as
big a worry as not being able to find people to fill jobs. If 78 percent of the current workforce at the Nuclear Regulatory
Commission, for example, is out in five years, who'll be left running the shop and passing on knowledge about how things work?
No matter how smart younger workers may be, no matter how many
advanced degrees they may have, they can't be expected to run the shop if knowledge transfer has been neglected.
In many cases, it takes years to transfer the intricate knowledge at the core of business. The Five O'Clock Club says
every company must do four things to survive:
Change the attitudes and perceptions about mature workers.
Develop more effective structures to recruit and retain older workers.
Create training and development initiatives to level the playing field for all employees.
Build effective succession planning to enable knowledge transfer.
To test whether employers discriminate against black job applicants, Marianne Bertrand of the University of Chicago and
Sendhil Mullainathan of M.I.T. conducted an unusual experiment. They selected 1,300 help-wanted ads from newspapers in Boston
and Chicago and submitted multiple resumes from phantom job seekers. The researchers randomly assigned the first names
on the resumes, choosing from one set that is particularly common among blacks and from another that is common among
whites. So Kristen and Tamika, and Brad and Tyrone, applied for jobs from
the same pool of want ads and had equivalent resumes. Nine names were selected to represent each category: black women,
white women, black men, and white men. Last names common to the racial group were also assigned. Four resumes were
typically submitted for each job opening, drawn from a reservoir of 160. Nearly 5,000 applications were submitted from mid-2001 to
mid-2002. Professors Bertrand and Mullainathan kept track of which candidates were invited for job interviews. The results
are disturbing. Applicants with white-sounding names were 50 percent more likely to be called for interviews than were
those with black-sounding names. Interviews were requested for 10.1 percent of applicants with white-sounding names and only 6.7
percent of those with black-sounding names.
