How do you ensure that a recruitment process is fair? The world may be a more enlightened place than it once was – with people no longer openly barred from places on account of their gender, sexuality or race – but does discrimination still happen? If all you knew about someone was their name would you be able to draw a picture of them in your head?
Prime Minister David Cameron reckons this does still create a problem in modern society. He wrote a piece in the Guardian in which he argued: “It’s no longer signs on doors that say ‘no blacks allowed’; it’s quieter and more subtle discrimination. It’s the disappointment of not getting your first choice of university place; it’s being passed over for promotion and not knowing why; it’s organisations that recruit in their own image and aren’t confident enough to do something different, like employing a disabled person or a young black man or woman. In my opinion, you won’t change these attitudes simply through more laws, but in smarter, more innovative ways.”
His solution is ‘name blind’ job applications, something that is being embraced by the civil service, BBC, NHS, local government, HSBC, Deloitte, KPMG, Virgin Money and learndirect.
This means that those companies – and more – will promise to assess an application without being able to see someone’s name at all. This would then leave businesses to focus on casting the net out and finding the best candidates – using the likes of The SmartList – getting a match based solely on the skills and experiences.
It sounds good, but will it actually help to make the recruitment system fair?
Anecdotal evidence suggests that a change of name can be significant when it comes to someone’s job application.
In the US, Yolanda Spivey shot to fame when she took the drastic step of using the name Bianca White to apply for jobs. She feared her actual name was ‘identified as black’ and deliberately chose a more ‘white sounding’ name.
It worked too. After a fruitless spell with no replies as Yolanda Spivey, Bianca White had a call back the very same day that she posted her CV.
José Zamora had a very similar experience, with interview opportunities only coming his way after he became ‘Joe’.
These have been high profile cases but academic studies have also looked at this in more depth. A summary of experiments in France, Germany and the Netherlands for the German Institute of Labour suggested that applicants from ethnic minorities are indeed more likely to be invited to interview as a result of a ‘blind recruitment’.
Yet it’s not possible to say that it will be an absolute bar to any discrimination. There’s no way of telling if, for example, people are any more or less likely to progress past an interview. It’s also possible, whether it is consciously or subconsciously, to get a picture of someone from their background, education and experiences – all things that remain on a ‘blind CV’.
It’s likely that blind recruitment will help and it will certainly stop recruiters from forming an opinion from name alone. But when it comes to discrimination as a whole, only a change in attitude from society over generations can eliminate this entirely. This can be an important milestone on the path to equality, but it won’t be the end in its own right.
