“In 1952 the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted one of the most famous recruitment tests of all time,” writes Georgina Dent in Tuesday’s (10/2) Australian Financial Review. After introducing blind auditions, “almost 50 per cent more women made it past the first audition,” and blind auditions are now widely used by orchestras in the U.S. “The … experiment is famous because it provides irrefutable evidence that unconscious bias exists.… Research shows that white-sounding names receive 50 per cent more callbacks for interviews than ethnic-sounding names… Hiding names from resumes allows candidates to be assessed more objectively…. After … wiping all personal identifiers from each candidate’s coding test, [digital app company] Slack has made tangible improvements in its diversity efforts.… Textio is a writing-enhancement service that uses AI to analyze job descriptions … highlighting … words that could come across as particularly masculine or feminine, to rewrite job descriptions. Johnson & Johnson reported an additional 90,000 female applicants, representing a 9 per cent increase in its pipeline, after using Textio to refine its job postings…. River City Labs CEO Peta Ellis says the tech sector needs to … ‘take our industry to a variety of different people.’ ”
Posted October 4, 2018
In photo: Poster for the 2017 film “Blind Audition”
