Tuesday, May 3rd, 2016

I’m introducing a new blog post series where I bullet point out some things I learned from reading an article. I’m calling it TIL (which usually stands for “today I learned”, but in my case I’m saying “things I learned” since I might have read the article in question a while back). This series has the benefit of a) forcing me to write up a précis of what I learned (hopefully solidifying it for me in my memory some more) and b) giving you a TL;DR summary of the article’s highlights.

I’m starting with Is Blind Hiring the Best Hiring? from Claire Cain Miller, writing for the New York Times Magazine.

Things I learned:

• you hear tech companies claim that a lack of diversity upstream (in universities and K-12) cause the lack of diversity in their hiring, but that’s not the case – just look at the stats
• blind hiring is inspired by the blind auditioning process for positions in an orchestra, where the applicant cannot be seen, only heard (they even use rugs to muffle the sound of high heels, which by itself can bias the judges!).
• People aren’t good at hiring:

“And, according to decades of research on the topic, humans just aren’t that good at hiring. A study of top banking, law and consulting firms found that similarities in things like leisure activities and personality were the most important factor in their evaluation of candidates.

• If you can incorporate blind hiring in the first steps of the hiring process, you will get a more diverse pool of candidates:

“GapJumpers has conducted more than 1,400 auditions for companies like Bloomberg and Dolby Laboratories. According to the company’s numbers, using conventional résumé screening, about a fifth of applicants who were not white, male, able-bodied people from elite schools made it to a first-round interview. Using blind auditions, 60 percent did.”

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