Hiring Discrimination: The Effects of Nationality and Domestic Experience on Candidates’ Opportunity to Demonstrate Professional Value during Interview

Aditi Rabindra Sachdeva, Kevin P. Nolanb, Nicholas P. Salterb, & Comila Shahani-Denningb

aPepsiCo, Inc

bDepartment of Psychology, Hofstra University

On September 30, 2020, Aditi Rabindra Sachdev presented her collaborative research on hiring discrimination at the Center for “Race” Colloquia Series. Held on the last Wednesday of every month during the academic year, in these colloquia, Hofstra faculty members are invited to present their recent publications and engage with new scholarship focusing on race, culture and social justice. Below is a summary of their research findings.

The contributions of foreign-born workers are essential for the stable growth of the U.S. economy. Unfortunately, about 40 percent leave the U.S. within a decade of their arrival due to a lack of fair employment opportunities. While the U.S. has equal employment laws and organizations undertake diversity initiatives, many immigrants report experiencing discrimination in hiring. It is imperative that we understand the reasons for this loss as estimates of projected labor shortages without these immigrants run as high as 18 million over the next 15 years.

So, what challenges do immigrants face? Employment interviews are one of the main barriers for skilled immigrants’ access to the U.S. labor market. This is because interviewers typically use their ‘expert judgment’ and choose the questions they ask candidates. When using their gut feeling to choose interview questions, interviewers tend to focus more on evaluating immigrants’ fit with organizational culture than their ability to do the job.

The issue with more focus on fit with organizational culture when evaluating immigrants is that it can lead to less information regarding their ability to perform the job as interviews occur over finite periods. This lowers their chance of being hired as information about candidates’ ability to do the job is considered to be important when making hiring decisions.

We conducted a research study, which confirmed that interviewers’ intention to assess immigrants’ fit with organizational culture at the expense of assessing their job proficiency is higher compared to American candidates. In fact, interviewers intend to spend less than 30% of the time assessing foreign candidates’ ability to perform the job and around 70% of the time evaluating their fit with organizational culture. On the other hand, American candidates are more than twice (66%) as likely to be asked job-related questions during an employment interview.

Do other factors influence the choice of interview questions? We examined if other factors could explain this phenomenon further and help understand how to combat biases that influence the choice of interview questions. The results of our study suggest that interviewers who are higher in xenophobia are more likely to ask questions aimed at assessing immigrants’ fit with organizational culture. We also found that when immigrants had work-related experience in the U.S., interviewers were less likely to focus on fit with organizational culture.

Overall, when interviewers use their gut feelings and rely on their fear of outsiders to choose interview questions, it can lead to discriminatory hiring decisions. Immigrants who have work-related experience in the U.S. can have an advantage over other foreign-born candidates as they might be seen as similar to other employees in the organization due to their exposure to the U.S. work culture. Considering these findings, we provide a few recommendations for organizations and interviewers to combat these unconscious biases. We also provide suggestions for the candidates to improve their marketability during an interview.

What can organizations do?

Provide predetermined list of questions
To reduce the potential biases while also appealing to interviewers’ desire to choose the questions they ask job candidates and the ability to exercise their intuition, interviewers can be allowed to choose questions from a predetermined list of interview questions and be required to ask the same questions to all candidates. Organizations should make sure that this predetermined list contains a higher proportion of questions assessing job proficiency than organizational culture fit so that interviewers select more questions assessing candidates’ ability to do the job. Organizations can also place a limit on the number of questions that interviewers can choose to assess candidates’ job proficiency versus fit with organizational culture. For instance, at least 70% of the questions chosen should assess job proficiency of candidates.

Help interviewers be aware of their biases
Organizations should provide training (e.g., unconscious bias training) to interviewers to ensure that they are aware of their own biases and learn how to actively avoid them. However, it should be noted that xenophobia is an attitude that is ingrained in an individual and bringing a change in this attitude requires effort over a sustained period of time. We thus recommend to not rely solely on training to combat biases and make conscious efforts to foster inclusive work environment by introducing zero-tolerance policies and emphasizing the importance of diversity and inclusion to employees.

What can interviewers do?

Be aware of unconscious biases
It is important to remember that we all have implicit biases. The first step to overcoming these biases is to recognize one’s potential reliance on stereotypes when evaluating outgroup candidates and make a conscious effort to combat them.

Ask the same questions to all candidates
Interviewers should be vigilant and refrain from formatting questions around each candidate. We suggest that interviewers ask the same questions to all candidates to make sure that the demographic characteristics of the candidates does not influence their choice of interview questions.

What can candidates do?

Integrate job abilities into the responses
We recommend candidates to integrate job-related experience into their answers to a potentially non-job-related question. For instance, when asked about the ability to build relationships with team members, candidates can describe their past experience of building relationships while working on a job-related project and how the relationships helped them accomplish the goals of the project efficiently.

Leverage work experience
Internship programs can help demonstrate candidates’ well-suitedness in the workplace and reduce the adjustment necessary to move from academic environment into the workplace. Candidates should leverage internship programs or any other opportunities to collaborate on projects with organizations and gain exposure to the work culture to increase their marketability and demonstrate a good fit.

Aditi Rabindra Sachdev works with Talent Management and the Organizational Development Team at PepsiCo, Inc. She is a Hofstra University alumnus.