When Resumes Are Made ‘Whiter’ to Please Potential Employers
They found that 36 percent of their interviewees reported whitening their resumes, and two-thirds of the respondents knew of friends or family who had done so in the past.
.. They found that whitened resumes were twice as likely to get callbacks—a pattern that held even for companies that emphasized diversity.
.. Kang says that employers should use blind recruitment—whereby information that might reveal a candidate’s race and gender are weeded out before review—in order to make it easier for managers to hire without discriminating. “We need to be realistic about humans and how we’re bad at making decisions when we have a lot of information that we have to process so quickly,” she says.
.. She added that “[whitening] may help these employees get a foot in the door, but it also is indicative of the sorts of challenges that will likely remain present for workers of color once hired in these spaces. Rhetorically speaking, if these workers have to ‘whiten’ their resumes to be considered for the job, what happens when they’re actually employed there?”
.. But the reason that stands out is that some students were actually including racial cues so that they could screen employers. As one black student told the researchers: “If blackness put a shadow over all [my resume] then it probably isn’t the job I want to be in.” Another voiced a similar concern, saying “I wouldn’t consider whitening my resume because if they don’t accept my racial identity, I don’t see how I would fit in that job.’’