Essay Sample on Human Resource and Hiring

Introduction

The article explains a field experiment that was conducted between 2001 and 2002 explaining matters of racial discrimination in the labor market. Each resume in the case study was given a very black-American name or a white name. The findings of the study show that there was extreme bias against the African-American names (Bertrand & Sendhil 991). People with white names got more callbacks for interviews than those with Black names. However, those people who were in a higher economic class got more callbacks regardless of their race. According to the research from the article, the racial discrimination in the labor market happened in all the industries.

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Save 25%

Moreover, when compared to the whites, Black people are more likely to be unemployed, and those who are working earn approximately 25% less than their counterparts in the same line of duty (Bertrand & Sendhil 992). The resume quality was one of the primary factors, and whites with high quality resumes got more callbacks than people of the same color with poorly written resumes. In summary, the findings from the study indicate that racial discrimination is still a significant issue in the labor market.

As noted in the article, the data for this study was collected between 2001 and 2002, almost 20 years ago. In my opinion, the results would similar if the study was conducted today. Even with equal employment policies in the United States, white people are still favored in the industries. Racial discrimination in the labor markets in the United States is still rampant, but with skill as a primary factor (Neumark 812). Some people argue that, in some cases. The employment bias occurs when some employers consider race as a factor for productivity. Others believe that employment bias is an issue of the past and was eliminated by some affirmative programs, labor policies, and profit maximization agendas. Just like it was twenty years ago, currently, an average black worker's employment is low, and their wages are below average as compared to their white counterparts working in the same industry. However, unlike in the past when the research was conducted, nowadays many factors influence the stark difference in the employment process. For example, many employers in the United States look at people's education levels and cultural norms.

Currently, discrimination in industries not only affects the blacks but also minority groups such as the Latinos and other people of color. However, there are concerns if the said discrimination is influenced by the prevailing market forces or pervasive bias and prejudice (Neumark 812). In the current economy, market forces have led to the rapid increase of skill requirement by any firm that is hiring, and the element named above is due to the growth of technology and high competition between industries. However, most firms are slow to hire African-Americans and swift to fire them because of bias which can be translated to racism.

Hiring blind is a process that makes the information of any applicant that could lead to prejudice anonymous. One of the concerns raised in the in the article in the HR magazine is that some employers have certain beliefs of how an excellent candidate should look like. The primary purpose of using blind hiring is to reduce ethnic and gender discrimination and promote equality in all the sectors. With this technique explained above, employers can be more objective when it comes to assessing the skills, capabilities, knowledge, and the probability of the interviewee to succeed in the firm without considering the latter's gender and race.

In my opinion, to reduce the ongoing bias in the hiring process, details such as age, gender, race, and sex should be scrapped off in the resumes. The primary goal of hiring is to find a competent person to do a particular job regardless of who it is (Neumark 800). University details could also be removed from the resumes of the applicants, and firms should only be interested with people who have the required skills for the job. However, process creation must be conducted after hiring an applicant blindly. The chosen applicant must be assigned ability and test relevant to the position in question. By creating such a system of blind hiring, other potential problems are created. For instance, focusing on the abilities and skills of the applicants can hardly tell the employer which candidate is fit for the job and the in the culture of the organization as well. Most companies prefer hiring for a cultural fit because it is a crucial factor when it comes to job satisfaction, performance, and employee retention.

The research study has several limitations. First, the sample size was small, and the research was conducted on a few participants. Between 2001 and 2000, the total American population was about 2284,000 million. There were approximately 1.8 million African-American people at that time. However, the sample size taken to conduct the research was small, and therefore, there is a probability that the results were inaccurate. Another limitation of the study is that several assumptions were made (Bertrand & Sendhil 997). For instance, the resumes used in the case study did not indicate the race of the applicants, but the researchers assumed that specific names sounded white and others black.

References

Bertrand, Marianne, and Sendhil Mullainathan. "Are Emily and Greg more employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A field experiment on labor market discrimination." American economic review 94.4 (2004): 991-1013.

Neumark, David. "Experimental research on labor market discrimination." Journal of Economic Literature 56.3 (2018): 799-866.