Pathways of exclusion : how common recruiting and hiring practices disadvantage non-elite applicants
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This dissertation presents findings from 14 months spent as an action researcher within a Silicon Valley startup. The startup provides an online platform to replace traditional applicant résumé screening with customized anonymous skills auditions for junior to mid-level technical positions. I collected and analyzed the results of more than 1400 anonymous auditions for junior technical roles and the results reveal two important findings. First, that men and women applied to technical roles at equal rates and were also equally likely to have their anonymous audition submission selected to advance. Second, compared to elite educated applicants, non-elite educated applicants were more likely to audition as well as be selected to advance. I also collected qualitative data from more than one hundred potential client companies, including their current recruiting and hiring practices and why they were interested in trying anonymous auditions. For those that went on to become clients, I collected and analyzed case-study like data from across the client lifecycle, from initial sales meetings through auditions, performance results, interviewing, and beyond. Qualitative findings include descriptions of the personnel observed during the project, the most common recruiting and hiring procedures used, and the way potential clients spoke about particular demographic groups of interest. In addition to these descriptive findings, I present four 'Pathways of Exclusion.' These are distinct categories of interactional and social psychological dynamics that run throughout traditional recruiting, screening, and hiring processes to disadvantage non-elite applicants. The four pathways include: widespread assumptions about the type of applicant that will be skills-qualified; the extreme role that applicant characteristics play in their treatment by organizations; and the ways that competition for elite applicants motivated bias toward non-elite applicants
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2020; ©2020 |
| Publication date | 2020; 2020 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Jank, Sharon |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Correll, Shelley Joyce |
| Thesis advisor | Correll, Shelley Joyce |
| Thesis advisor | Grusky, David B |
| Thesis advisor | Ridgeway, Cecilia L |
| Degree committee member | Grusky, David B |
| Degree committee member | Ridgeway, Cecilia L |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Sociology |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Sharon M. Jank |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Sociology |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2020 |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2020 by Sharon Jank
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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