Discuss some of the ways applicant resumes can potentially be rated in a bias manner, as well as provide two solutions to these biases.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

When examiners extract personal history data from a résumé, they are particularly prone to cognitive biases and heuristics because information is often limited to one or two pages. Specifically, applicants are likely to be placed into stereotype-based categories in a rather automatic fashion, and then attributes believed to be typical of the group are assigned to individual applicants--even if those beliefs are factually. Social categorization can take place on more than one category. For example, Derous et al. (2015) conducted an experiment in which 60 Dutch recruiters rated the job suitability of applicants whose résumés included information on ethnicity (Dutch, Arab) and gender (female, male). Results showed that ratings were influenced by applicants’ ethnicity (i.e., Arabs were rated more negatively) and gender (i.e., men were rated more negatively), raters’ prejudice (i.e., those with more negative attitudes toward a particular group rated members of those groups more negatively), and job characteristics (i.e., results were more pronounced when jobs included more client contact). Hiemstra et al. (2012) conducted a study involving 445 unemployed job seekers who had received a 2-day job-application training in the Netherlands and found that they perceived video résumés to be more fair compared to traditional paper résumés regardless of applicant’s ethnicity (i.e., Dutch, Turkish, Moroccan, Surinamese/Antillean, other non-Westerners, and other Western applicants). Overall, given the many factors that influence raters’ evaluation of personal history data based on résumés screening, it is important to (a) provide training to raters to make sure they focus on job-related factors and (b) assess interrater reliability (Brown & Campion, 1994).